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HANDBOUND
AT THE

William Barnes

THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: A STUDY IN
HUMAN NATURE. Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-
IQ02. 8vo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans,
Green & Co. 1902.

PRAGMATISM : A NEW NAME FOR SOME OLD WAYS OF THINK
ING: POPULAR LECTURES ON PHILOSOPHY. 8vo. New York,
London, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1907.

THE MEANING OF TRUTH: A SEQUEL TO " PRAGMATISM." Svo.
New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co.
1909.

A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE: HIBBERT LECTURES ON THE
PRESENT SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY. Svo. New York, Lon
don, Bombay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1909.

SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: A BEGINNING OF AN IN
TRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. Svo. New York, London, Bom
bay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1911.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM. Svo. New York, London, Bom
bay, and Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1912.

THE WILL TO BELIEVE, AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR
PHILOSOPHY. i2mo. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta :
Longmans, Green & Co. 1897.

MEMORIES AND STUDIES. Svo. New York, London, Bombay, and
Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1911.

THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 vols., Svo. New York ;
Henry Holt & Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1890.

PSYCHOLOGY: BRIEFER COURSE. i2mo. New York: Henry Holt
& Co. London : Macmillan & Co. 1892.

TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS
ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS. i2mo. New York : Henry Holt
& Co. London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1899.

HUMAN IMMORTALITY: TWO SUPPOSED OBJECTIONS TO THE
DOCTRINE. i6mo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. London : Archi
bald Constable & Co. 1898.

THE LITERARY REMAINS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited, with an
Introduction, by William James. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. 1885.

ESSAYS IN
KADICAL EMPIKICISM

BY
WILLIAM JAMES

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO

FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK

LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA

1912

EDITOR'S PREFACE

THE present volume is an attempt to carry
out a plan which William James is known to
have formed several years before his death.
In 1907 he collected reprints in an envelope
which he inscribed with the title 'Essays in
Radical Empiricism'; and he also had dupli
cate sets of these reprints bound, under the
same title, and deposited for the use of stu
dents in the general Harvard Library, and in
the Philosophical Library in Emerson Hall.

Two years later Professor James published
The Meaning of Truth and A Pluralistic Uni
verse, and inserted in these volumes several of
the articles which he had intended to use in the
'Essays in Radical Empiricism.' Whether he
would nevertheless have carried out his original
plan, had he lived, cannot be certainly known.
Several facts, however, stand out very clearly.
In the first place, the articles included in the
original plan but omitted from his later vol
umes are indispensable to the understanding

iii

EDITOR'S PREFACE

of his other writings. To these articles he re
peatedly alludes. Thus, in The Meaning of
Truth (p. 127), he says: "This statement is
probably excessively obscure to any one who
has not read my two articles * Does Conscious
ness Exist ? ' and 'A World of Pure Experi
ence.'" Other allusions have been indicated in
the present text. In the second place, the arti
cles originally brought together as 'Essays in
Radical Empiricism ' form a connected whole.
Not only were most of them written consecu
tively within a period of two years, but they
contain numerous cross-references. In the third
place, Professor James regarded 'radical em
piricism' as an independent doctrine. This he
asserted expressly: "Let me say that there is
no logical connexion between pragmatism, as
I understand it, and a doctrine which I have
recently set forth as 'radical empiricism.' The
latter stands on its own feet. One may en
tirely reject it and still be a pragmatist."
(Pragmatism, 1907, Preface, p. ix.) Finally,
Professor James came toward the end of his

life to regard /radical empiricism' as more

EDITOR'S PREFACE

fundamental and more important than 'prag
matism.' In the Preface to The Meaning of
Truth (1909), the author gives the following
explanation of his desire to continue, and if
possible conclude, the controversy over prag
matism : " I am interested in another doctrine in
philosophy to which I give the name of radical
empiricism, and it seems to me that the estab
lishment of the pragmatist theory of truth is a
step of first-rate importance in making radical
empiricism prevail" (p. xii).

In preparing the present volume, the editor
has therefore been governed by two motives.
On the one hand, he has sought to preserve and
make accessible certain important articles not
to be found in Professor James's other books.
This is true of Essays I, II, IV, V, VIII, IX, X,
XI, and XII. On the other hand, he has sought
to bring together in one volume a set of essays
treating systematically of one independent, co^
herent, and fundamental doctrine. To this end
it has seemed best to include three essays (III,
VI, and VII), which, although included in the
original plan, were afterwards reprinted else-

EDITOR'S PREFACE

where; and one essay, XII, not included in the
original plan. Essays III, VI, and VII are in
dispensable to the consecutiveness of the se
ries, and are so interwoven with the rest that
it is necessary that the student should have
them at hand for ready consultation. Essay
XII throws an important light on the author's
general 'empiricism/ and forms an important
link between * radical empiricism' and the
author's other doctrines.

In short, the present volume is designed not
as a collection but rather as a treatise. It is
intended that another volume shall be issued
which shall contain papers having biographical
or historical importance which have not yet
been reprinted in book form. The present vol
ume is intended not only for students of Pro
fessor James's philosophy, but for students
of metaphysics and the theory of knowledge.
It sets forth systematically and within brief
compass the doctrine of 'radical empiricism.'

A word more may be in order concerning the
general meaning of this doctrine. In the Pre
face to the Will to Believe (1898), Professor

EDITOR'S PREFACE

James gives the name "radical empiricism" to
his "philosophic attitude," and adds the follow
ing explanation: "I say 'empiricism,' because
it is contented to regard its most assured con
clusions concerning matters of fact as hypo
theses liable to modification in the course of
future experience; and I say ' radical/ because
it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an
hypothesis, and, unlike so much of the halfway
empiricism that is current under the name of
positivism or agnosticism or scientific natural
ism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as
something with which all experience has got
to square" (pp. vii-viii). An 'empiricism' of
this description is a "philosophic attitude"
or temper of mind rather than a doctrine,
and characterizes all of Professor James's
writings. It is set forth in Essay XII of the
present volume.

• In a narrower sense, 'empiricism' is the
method of resorting to particular experiences for
the solution of philosophical problems. Ratio
nalists are the men of principles, empiricists the
men of facts. (Some Problems of Philosophy,

vii

EDITOR'S PREFACE

p. 35; cf. also, ibid., p. 44; and Pragmatism, pp.
9, 51.) Or, "since principles are universals,
and facts are particulars, perhaps the best way
of characterizing the two tendencies is to say
that rationalist thinking proceeds most will
ingly by going from wholes to parts, while em
piricist thinking proceeds by going from parts
to wholes." (Some Problems of Philosophy,
p. 35; cf. also ibid., p. 98; and A Pluralistic
Universe, p. 7.) Again, empiricism "remands
us to sensation." (Op. cit., p. 264.) The "em-
j piricist view" insists that, "as reality is cre-
1 ated temporally day by day, concepts . . .
can never fitly supersede perception. . . . The
deeper features of reality are found only in
perceptual experience." (Some Problems of
Philosophy, pp. 100, 97.) Empiricism in this
sense is as yet characteristic of Professor
James's philosophy as a whole. It is not the
distinctive and independent doctrine set forth
in the present book.

The only summary of 'radical empiricism ' in
this last and narrowest sense appears in the

Preface to The Meaning of Truth (pp. xii-xiii) ;

viii

EDITOR'S PREFACE

and it must be reprinted here as the key to the
text that follows.1

"Radical empiricism consists (1) first of a
postulate, (2) next of a statement of fact,
(3) and finally of a generalized conclusion."

(1) "The postulate is that the only things
that shall be debatable among philosophers shall
be things definable in terms drawn from experi
ence. (Things of an unexperienceable nature
may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of
the material for philosophic debate.) " This is
"the principle of pure experience" as "a meth
odical postulate." (Cf. below, pp. 159, 241.)
This postulate corresponds to the notion which
the author repeatedly attributes to Shadworth
Hodgson, the notion "that realities are only
what they are 'known as.' !J (Pragmatism, p.
50; Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 443;
The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43, 118.) In this
sense 'radical empiricism' and pragmatism are
closely allied. Indeed, if pragmatism be defined
as the assertion that "the meaning of any pro
position can always be brought down to some

1 The use of numerals and italics is introduced by the editor.
ix

EDITOR'S PREFACE

particular consequence in our future practical
experience, . . . the point lying in the fact
that the experience must be particular rather
than in the fact that it must be active"
(Meaning of Truth, p. 210) ; then pragmatism
and the above postulate come to the same
thing. The present book, however, consists
not so much in the assertion of this postu
late as in the use of it. And the method is
successful in special applications by virtue
of a certain "statement of fact" concerning
relations.

(2) "The statement of fact is that the rela
tions between things, conjunctive as well as dis
junctive, are just as much matters of direct par
ticular experience, neither more so nor less so,
than the things themselves." (Cf. also A Plural
istic Universe, p. 280; The Will to Believe, p.
278.) This is the central doctrine of the pre
sent book. It distinguishes 'radical empiri
cism' from the "ordinary empiricism" of
Hume, J. S. Mill, etc., with wrhich it is otherwise
allied. (Cf. below, pp. 42-44.) It provides an
empirical and relational version of 'activity,'

EDITOR'S PREFACE

and so distinguishes the author's voluntarism
from a view with which it is easily confused
— the view which upholds a pure or transcend
ent activity. (Cf. below, Essay VI.) It makes
it possible to escape the vicious disjunctions
that have thus far baffled philosophy: such
disjunctions as those between consciousness
and physical nature, between thought and its
object, between one mind and another, and
between one 'thing' and another. These dis
junctions need not be 'overcome' by calling in
any "extraneous trans-empirical connective
support" (Meaning of Truth, Preface, p. xiii);
they may now be avoided by regarding the
dualities in question as only differences of em
pirical relationship among common empirical
terms. The pragmatistic account of 'meaning '
and 'truth,' shows only how a vicious disjunc
tion between 'idea' and 'object' may thus be
avoided. The present volume not only pre
sents pragmatism in this light; but adds simi
lar accounts of the other dualities mentioned
above.

Thus while pragmatism and radical empiri-
xi

EDITOR'S PREFACE

cism do not differ essentially when regarded as
methods, they are independent when regarded
as doctrines. For it would be possible to hold
the pragmatistic theory of 'meaning' and
'truth,' without basing it on any fundamen
tal theory of relations, and without extending
such a theory of relations to residual philo
sophical problems; without, in short, holding
either to the above 'statement of fact,' or to
the following 'generalized conclusion.'

(3) "The generalized conclusion is that
therefore the parts of experience hold together
from next to next by relations that are themselves
parts of experience. The directly apprehended
universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-
empirical connective support, but possesses in its
own right a concatenated or continuous struc
ture." When thus generalized, 'radical em
piricism' is not only a theory of knowledge
comprising pragmatism as a special chapter,
but a metaphysic as well. It excludes "the
hypothesis of trans-empirical reality " (Cf . be
low, p. 195). It is the author's most rigorous
statement of his theory that reality is an "ex-

xii

EDITOR'S PREFACE

perience-continuum." (Meaning of Truth, p.
152; A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. v, vn.) It is
that positive and constructive 'empiricism' of
which Professor James said : "Let empiricism
once become associated with religion, as hith
erto, through some strange misunderstanding,
it has been associated with irreligion, and I
believe that a new era of religion as well as of
philosophy will be ready to begin." (Op. cit.,
p. 314; cf. ibid., Lect. vm, passim; and The
Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 515-527.)
The editor desires to acknowledge his obli
gations to the periodicals from which these
essays have been reprinted, and to the many
friends of Professor James who have rendered
valuable advice and assistance in the prepara
tion of the present volume.

RALPH BARTON PERRY.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS.
January 8, 1912.

CONTENTS

v I. DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST? . 1*

^
<•• * II. A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE . . 39

•f '
v HI. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 92

. IV. How Two MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING . . 123

V V. THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD

OF PURE EXPERIENCE 137

/ /5

V^ VI. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 155

y -)
VII. THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM .... .190

VHI. LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE 206

IX. Is RADICAL EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC? . . . .234

X. MR. PITKIN'S REFUTATION OF ' RADICAL EMPIRI- 1

CISM' 241

^
XI. HUMANISM AND TRUTH ONCE MORE .... 244

v
XH. ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM 266

INDEX

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?1

4 THOUGHTS' and 'things' are names for two
sorts of object, which common sense will al
ways find contrasted and will always practi
cally oppose to each other. Philosophy, re
flecting on the contrast, has varied in the
past in her explanations of it, and may be
expected to vary in the future. At first,
'spirit and matter,' 'soul and body,' stood for
a pair of equipollent substances quite on a par
in weight and interest. But one day Kant un
dermined the soul and brought in the tran
scendental ego, and ever since then the bipolar
relation has been very much off its balance.
The transcendental ego seems nowadays in
rationalist quarters to stand for everything, in
empiricist quarters for almost nothing. In the
hands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke,
Natorp, Munsterberg — at any rate in his

1 [Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scien
tific Methods, vol. I, No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation be
tween this essay and those which follow, cf . below, pp. 53-54. ED.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

earlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others,
the spiritual principle attenuates itself to a
thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a
name for the fact that the 'content' of experi
ence is known. It loses personal form and act
ivity — these passing over to the content —
and becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein
uberhaupt, of which in its own right absolutely

nothing can be said.

j~~"

I believe that ' consciousness,' when once it
has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphane
ity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.
It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right
to a place among first principles. Those who
still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the
faint rumor left behind by the disappearing
'soul' upon the air of philosophy. During the
past year, I have read a number of articles
whose authors seemed just on the point of aban
doning the notion of consciousness,1 and sub
stituting for it that of an absolute experience
not due to two factors. But they were not

1 Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander and others.
Dr. Perry is frankly over the border. ,

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

quite radical enough, not quite daring enough
in their negations. For twenty years past I
have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;
for seven or eight years past I have suggested
its non-existence to my students, and tried to
give them its pragmatic equivalent in reali
ties of experience. It seems to me that the hour
is ripe for it to be openly and universally dis
carded^

To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists
seems so absurd on the face of it — for undeni
ably 'thoughts' do exist — that I fear some
readers will follow me no farther. Let me then
immediately explain that I mean only to deny
that the word stands for an entity, but to insist
most emphatically that it does stand for a
function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff
or quality of being,1 contrasted with that of
which material objects are made, out of which
our thoughts of them are made; but there is a
function in experience which thoughts per
form, and for the performance of which this

1 [Similarly, there is no "activity of 'consciousness' as such." gee
below, pp. 170 ff., note. ED.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

quality of being is invoked. That function is
"I knowing. 'Consciousness' is supposed neces
sary to explain the fact that things not only
are, but get reported, are known. Whoever
blots out the notion of consciousness from his
list of first principles must still provide in some
way for that function's being carried on.

My thesis is that if we start with the suppo
sition that there is only one primal stuff_or
material in the world, a stuff of which every
thing is composed, and if we call that stuff
'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be
explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of
pure experience may enter. The relation itself
is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms'
becomes the subject or bearer of the know
ledge, the knower,1 the other becomes the ob
ject known. This will need much explanation
before it can be understood. The best way to

1 In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower
other than the 'passing thought.' [Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp.
338 ff.]

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

get it understood is to contrast it with the al
ternative view; and for that we may take the
recentest alternative, that in which the evapo
ration of the definite soul-substance has pro
ceeded as far as it can go without being yet
complete. If neo-Kantism has expelled earlier
forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all
forms if we are able to expel neo-Kantism in its
turn.

For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word
consciousness to-day does no more than signal
ize the fact that experience is indef easibly dual-
istic in structure. It means that not subject,
not object, but object-plus-subject is the mini
mum that can actually be. The subject-object
distinction meanwhile is entirely different from
that between mind and matter, from that be
tween body and soul. Souls were detachable,
had separate destinies; things could happen to
them. To consciousness as such nothing can
happen, for, timeless itself, it is only a witness
of happenings in time, in which it plays no
part. It is, in a word, but the logical correla
tive of 'content' in an Experience of which the

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that
awareness of content takes place. Consciousness
as such is entirely impersonal — 'self and its
activities belong to the content. To say that I
am self-conscious, or conscious of putting forth
volition, means only that certain contents, for
which 'self ' and ' effort of will' are the names,
are not without witness as they occur.

Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kant
ian spring, we should have to admit conscious
ness as an 'epistemological' necessity, even if
we had no direct evidence of its being there.

But in addition to this, we are supposed by
almost every one to have an immediate con
sciousness of consciousness itself. When the
world of outer fact ceases to be materially pre
sent, and we merely recall it in memory, or
fancy it, the consciousness is believed to stand
out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner
flowing, which, once known in this sort of expe
rience, may equally be detected in presenta
tions of the outer world. "The moment we try
to fix our attention upon consciousness and to

see what, distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

"it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had be
fore us a mere emptiness. When we try to in
trospect the sensation of blue, all we can see is
the blue; the other element is as if it were dia
phanous. Yet it can be distinguished, if we
look attentively enough, and know that there
is something to look for." l "Consciousness"
(Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "is
inexplicable and hardly describable, yet all con
scious experiences have this in common that
what we call their content has this peculiar re
ference to a centre for which 'self is the name,
in virtue of which reference alone the content
is subjectively given, or appears. . . . While
in this way consciousness, or reference to a
self, is the only thing which distinguishes a con
scious content from any sort of being that
might be there with no one conscious of it, yet
this only ground of the distinction defies all
closer explanations. The existence of conscious
ness, although it is the fundamental fact of
psychology, can indeed be laid down as cer
tain, can, be brought out by analysis, but can

i G. E. Moore: Mind, vol. xn, N. S., [1903], p. 450.
7

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

neither be defined nor deduced from anything
but itself."1

'Can be brought out by analysis/ this
author says. This supposes that the conscious
ness is one element, moment, factor — call it
what you like — of an experience of essentially
dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you
abstract the content, the consciousness will re
main revealed to its own eye. Experience, at
this rate, would be much like a paint of which
the world pictures were made. Paint has a dual
constitution, involving, as it does, a men
struum 2 (oil, size or what not) and a mass of
content in the form of pigment suspended
therein. We can get the pure menstruum by
letting the pigment settle, and the pure pig
ment by pouring off the size or oil. We operate
here by physical subtraction; and the usual
view is, that by mental subtraction we can
separate the two factors of experience in an

1 Paul Natorp: Einleitung in die Psychologic, 1888, pp. 14, 112.

2 "Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one
universal solvent, or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds
of psychic acts and facts are contained, whether in concealed or in
obvious form." G. T. Ladd: Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory,
1894, p. 30.

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

analogous way — not isolating them entirely,
but distinguishing them enough to know that

they are two.

Now my contention is exactly the reverse of
this. Experience, I believe, has no such inner du
plicity; and the separation of it into conscious
ness and content comes, not by way of subtraction,
but by way of addition — the addition, to a
given concrete piece of it, of other sets of expe
riences, in connection with which severally its
use or function may be of two different kinds.
The paint will also serve here as an illustration.
In a pot in a paint-shop, along with other
paints, it serves in its entirety as so much sale
able matter. Spread on a canvas, with other
paints around it, it represents, on the contrary,
a feature in a picture and performs a spiritual
function. Just so, I maintain, does a given un
divided portion of experience, taken in one
context of associates, play the part of a knower,
of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in
a different context the same undivided bit of
experience plays the part of a thing known, of

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

an objective * content.' In a word, in one group
it figures as a thought, in another group as a
thing. And, since it can figure in both groups
\ simultaneously we have every right to speak of
\ it as subjective and objective both at once.
The dualism connoted by such double-bar
relled terms as * experience,' 'phenomenon,'
'datum,' 'Vorfindung* — terms which, in phi
losophy at any rate,,tend more and more to re
place the single-barrelled terms of 'thought'
and 'thing' — that dualism, I say, is still pre
served in this account, but reinterpreted, so
that, instead of being mysterious and elusive,
1 it Jbecomes verifiable and concrete. It is an af
fair of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the
single experience considered, and can always
i be particularized and defined.

i The entering wedge for this more concrete

i way of understanding the dualism was fash-

i ioned by Locke when he made the word ' idea '

stand indifferently for thing and thought, and

by Berkeley when he said that what common

sense means by realities is exactly what the

philosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect
clearness, but it seems to me that the concep
tion I am defending does little more than con
sistently carry out the 'pragmatic' method
which they were the first to use.

If the reader will take his own experiences,
he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a
perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so
called, of a physical object, his actual field of
vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is
reading as its centre; and let him for the pre
sent treat this complex object in the common-
sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be,
namely, a collection of physical things cut out
from an environing world of other physical
things with which these physical things have
actual or potential relations. Now at the same
time it is just those self -same things which his
mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole phi
losophy of perception from Democritus's time
downwards has been just one long wrangle over
the paradox that what is evidently one reality
should be in two places at once, both in outer

space and in a person's mind. 'Represent-

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ative' theories of perception avoid the logical
paradox, but on the other hand they violate the
reader's sense of life, which knows no inter
vening mental image but seems to see the room
and the book immediately just as they physi
cally exist.

The puzzle of how the one identical room can
be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of
how one identical point can be on two lines* It.
can, if it be situated at their intersection-; and
similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room
were a place of intersection of two processes,
which connected it with different groups of as
sociates respectively, it could be counted twice
over, as belonging to either group, and spoken
of loosely as existing in two places, although it
would remain all the time a numerically single
thing.

Well, the experience is a member of diverse
processes that can be followed away from it
along entirely different lines. The one self-
identical thing has so many relations to the
rest of experience that you can take it in dis
parate systems of association, and treat it as

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

belonging with opposite contexts.1 In one of
these contexts it is your 'field of consciousr
ness'; in another it is 'the room in which you
sit/ and it enters both contexts in its whole
ness, giving no pretext for being said to attach
itself to consciousness by one of its parts or'
aspects, and to outer reality by another. What
are the two processes, now, into which the
room-experience simultaneously enters in this
way?

One of them is the reader's personal bio
graphy, the other is the history of the house of
which the room is part. The presentation, the
experience, the that in short (for until we have
decided what it is it must be a mere that} is the
last term of a train of sensations, emotions,
decisions, movements, classifications, expect
ations, etc., ending in the present, and the first
term of a series of similar 'inner' operations
extending into the future, on the reader's
part. On the other hand, the very same that
is the terminus ad quern of a lot of previous

1 [For a parallel statement of this view, cf . the author's Meaning of
Truth, p. 49, note. Cf. also below, pp. 196-197. ED.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

physical operations, carpentering, papering,
furnishing, warming, etc., and the terminus a
quo of a lot of future ones, in which it will be
concerned when undergoing the destiny of a
physical room. The physical and the mental
operations form curiously incompatible groups.
As a room, the experience has occupied that
spot and had that environment for thirty
years. As your field of consciousness it may
never have existed until now. As a room, at
tention will go on to discover endless new de
tails in it. As your mental state merely, few
new ones will emerge under attention's eye.
As a room, it will take an earthquake, or a
gang of men, and in any case a certain amount
of time, to destroy it. As your subjective
state, the closing of your eyes, or any instan
taneous play of your fancy will suffice. In the
real world, fire will consume it. In your mind,
you can let fire play over it without effect. As
an outer object, you must pay so much a
month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you
may occupy it for any length of time rent-free.
If, in short, you follow it in the mental direc-

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

tion, taking it along with events of personal
biography solely, all sorts of things are true
of it which are false, and false of it which are
true if you treat it as a real thing experienced,
follow it in the physical direction, and relate it
to associates in the outer world.

Ill

So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis
will probably grow less plausible to the reader
when I pass from percepts to concepts, or from/
the case of things presented to that of things
remote. I believe, nevertheless, that here also
the same law holds good. If we take concept
ual manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they
also are in their first intention mere bits of
pure experience, and, as such, are single thats
which act in one context as objects, and in an
other context figure as mental states. By tak
ing them in their first intention, I mean ignor
ing their relation to possible perceptual ex
periences with which they may be connected,
which they may lead to and terminate in, and
which then they may be supposed to 'repre-

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

sent/ Taking them in this way first, we con
fine the problem to a world merely * thought-
of ' and not directly felt or seen.1 This world,
just like the world of percepts, comes to us at
first as a chaos of experiences, but lines of order
soon get traced. We find that any bit of it
which we may cut out as an example is con
nected with distinct groups of associates, just
as our perceptual experiences are, that these
associates link themselves with it by different
relations,2 and that one forms the inner history
of a person, while the other acts as an imper
sonal 'objective' world, either spatial and tem
poral, or else merely logical or mathematical,
or otherwise 'ideal.'

The first obstacle on the part of the reader to
seeing that these non-perceptual experiences

1 [For the author's recognition of "concepts as a co-ordinate
realm" of reality, cf. his Meaning of Truth, pp. 42, 195, note; A Plural
istic Universe, pp. 339-340; Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 50-57,
67-70; and below, p. 16, note. Giving this view the name 'logical
realism,' he remarks elsewhere that his philosophy "maybe regarded
as somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with
an otherwise empiricist mode of thought" (Some Problems of Philoso
phy, p. 106). ED.]

2 Here as elsewhere the relations are of course experienced rela
tions, members of the same originally chaotic manifold of non-
perceptual experience of which the related terms themselves are
parts. [Cf. below, p. 42.]

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

have objectivity as well as subjectivity will
probably be due to the intrusion into his mind
of percepts, that third group of associates with
which the non-perceptual experiences have re
lations, and which, as a whole, they "represent/
standing to them as thoughts to things. This
important function of the non-perceptual expe
riences complicates the question and confuses
it; for, so used are we to treat percepts as
the sole genuine realities that, unless we keep
them out of the discussion, we tend altogether
to overlook the objectivity that lies in non-
perceptual experiences by themselves. We
treat them, 'knowing' percepts as they do, as
through and through subjective, and say that
they are wholly constituted of the stuff called
consciousness, using this term now for a kind
of entity, after the fashion which I am seeking
to refute.1

Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether,
what I maintain is, that any single non-per-

1 Of the representative function of non-perceptual experience as a
whole, I will say a word in a subsequent article: it leads too far into the
general theory of knowledge for much to be said about it in a short
paper like this. [Cf. below, pp. 52 ff.J

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ceptual experience tends to get counted twice
over, just as a perceptual experience does, figur
ing in one context as an object or field of ob
jects, in another as a state of mind: and all this
without the least internal self -diremption on its
own part into consciousness and content. It is
all consciousness in one taking; and, in the
other, all content.

I find this objectivity of non-perceptual ex
periences, this complete parallelism in point of
reality between the presently felt and the re
motely thought, so well set forth in a page of
Mtinsterberg's Grundzuge, that I will quote it
as it stands.

"I may only think of my objects," says Pro
fessor Mlinsterberg; "yei, in my living thought
they stand before me exactly as perceived ob
jects would do, no matter how different the two
ways of apprehending them may be in their
genesis. The book here lying on the table before
me, and the book in the next room of which I
think and which I mean to get, are both in the
same sense given realities for me, realities
which I acknowledge and of which I take ac-

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

count. If you agree that the perceptual object
is not an idea within me, but that percept and
thing, as indistinguishably one, are really expe
rienced there, outside, you ought not to believe
that the merely thought-of object is hid away
inside of the thinking subject. The object of
which I think, and of whose existence I take
cognizance without letting it now work upon
my senses, occupies its definite place in the
outer world as much as does the object which I
directly see."

"What is true of the here and the there, is
also true of the now and the then. I know of
the thing which is present and perceived, but I
know also of the thing which yesterday was
but is no more, and which I only remember.
Both can determine my present conduct, both
are parts of the reality of which I keep account.
It is true that of much of the past I am uncer
tain, just as I am uncertain of much of what
is present if it be but dimly perceived. But the

interval of time does not in principle alter my

•

relation to the object, does not transform it
from an object known into a mental state. . . .

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

The things in the room here which I survey,
and those in my distant home of which I think,
the things of this minute and those of my long-
vanished boyhood,' influence and decide me
alike, with a reality which my experience of
them directly feels. They both make up my
real world, they make it directly, they do not
have first to be introduced to me and medi
ated by ideas which now and here arise
within me. . . . This not-me character of
my recollections and expectations does not
imply that the external objects of which I am
aware in those experiences should necessarily
be there also for others. The objects of dream
ers and hallucinated persons are wholly with
out general validity. But even were they cen
taurs and golden mountains, they still would
be 'off there,' in fairy land, and not 'inside5 of
ourselves." 1

This certainly is the immediate, primary,
naif, or practical way of taking our thought-of
world. Were there no perceptual world to
serve as its 'reductive,' in Taine's sense, by

1 Mfinsterberg: Grundziige der Psychologic, vol. i, p. 48.
20

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

being "stronger5 and more genuinely 'outer'
(so that the whole merely thought-of world
seems weak and inner in comparison), our
world of thought would be the only world, and
would enjoy complete reality in our belief.
This actually happens in our dreams, and in
our day-dreams so long as percepts do not
interrupt them.

And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to
our late example) is also a field of conscious
ness, so the conceived or recollected room is
also a state of mind; and the doubling-up of the
experience has in both cases similar grounds.

The room thought-of, namely, has many
thought-of couplings with many thought-of
things. Some of these couplings are inconstant,
others are stable. In the reader's personal his
tory the room occupies a single date — he saw
it only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the house's
history, on the other hand, it forms a perma
nent ingredient. Some couplings have the curi
ous stubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, of
fact; others show the fluidity of fancy — we let
them come and go as we please. Grouped with

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the rest of its house, with the name of its town,
of its owner, builder, value, decorative plan,
the room maintains a definite foothold, to
which, if we try to loosen it, it tends to return,
and to reassert itself with force.1 With these
associates, in a word, it coheres, while to other
houses, other towns, other owners, etc., it shows
no tendency to cohere at all. The two collec
tions, first of its cohesive, and, second, of its
loose associates, inevitably come to be con
trasted. We call the first collection the system
of external realities, in the midst of which the
room, as 'real,5 exists; the other we call the
stream of our internal thinking, in which, as a
'mental image,' it for a moment floats.2 The
room thus again gets counted twice over. It
plays two different roles, being Gedanke and
Gedachtes, the thought-of-an-object, and the
object-thought-of, both in one; and all this
without paradox or mystery, just as the same

1 Cf. A. L. Hodder: The Adversaries of the Sceptic, pp. 94-99.

2 For simplicity's sake I confine my exposition to 'external' reality.
But there is also the system of ideal reality in which the room plays its
part. Relations of comparison, of classification, serial order, value,
also are stubborn, assign a definite place to the room, unlike the inco
herence of its places in the mere rhapsody of our successive thoughts.
[Cf. above, p. 16.]

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

material thing may be both low and high, or
small and great, or bad and good, because of its
relations to opposite parts of an environing
world.

As 'subjective' we say that the experience
represents; as 'objective' it is represented.
What represents and what is represented is here \
numerically the same; but we must remember /
that no dualism of being represented and re- 1
presenting resides in the experience per se. In
its pure state, or when isolated, there is no self-
splitting of it into consciousness and what the
consciousness is 'of.' Its subjectivity and ob
jectivity are functional attributes solely, real
ized only when the experience is 'taken,' i. e.9
talked-of , twice, considered along with its two
differing contexts respectively, by a new retro
spective experience, of which that whole past
complication now forms the fresh content.

The instant field of the present is at all times -\j
what I call the 'pure' experience. It is only
virtually or potentially either object or subject
as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unquali
fied actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

naif immediacy it is of course valid; it is there,
we act upon it; and the doubling of it in retro
spection into a state of mind and a reality in
tended thereby, is just one of the acts. The
'state of mind/ first treated explicitly as such
in retrospection, will stand corrected or con
firmed, and the retrospective experience in its
turn will get a similar treatment; but the im
mediate experience in its passing is always
'truth,' * practical truth, something to act on, at
its own movement. If the world were then and
there to go out like a candle, it would remain
truth absolute and objective, for it would be
'the last word,' would have no critic, and no
one would ever oppose the thought in it to the
reality intended.2

I think I may now claim to have made my

1 Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes
objectively and sometimes subjectively.

2 In the Psychological Review for July [1904], Dr. R. B. Perry has
published a view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine than
any other with which I am acquainted. At present. Dr. Perry thinks,
every field of experience is so much 'fact.' It becomes 'opinion' or
* thought' only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking the
same object, alters and corrects it. But the corrective experience
becomes itself in turn corrected, and thus experience as a whole is a
process in which what is objective originally forever turns subjective,
turns into our apprehension of the object. I strongly recommend
Dr. Perry's admirable article to my readers.

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of \
external relation, and does not denote a special
stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our ex
periences, that they not only are, but are known,
which their 'conscious9 quality is invoked to
explain, is better explained by their relations —
these relations themselves being experiences — to
one another.

Were I now to go on to treat of the knowing
of perceptual by conceptual experiences, it
would again prove to be an affair of external
relations. One experience would be the knower,
the other the reality known; and I could
perfectly well define, without the notion of
'consciousness,' what the knowing actually
and practically^amounts to — leading-towards,
namely, and terminating-in percepts, through
a series of transitional experiences which the
world supplies. But I will not treat of this,
space being insufficient.1 I will rather consider

1 I have given a partial account of the matter in Mind, vol. x, p. 27,
1885 [reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-42], and in the
Psychological Review, vol. n, p. 105, 1895 [partly reprinted in The
Meaning of Truth, pp. 43-50]. See also C. A. Strong's article in the

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

a few objections that are sure to be urged
against the entire theory as it stands.

First of all, this will be asked: "If experience
has not 'conscious' existence, if it be not
partly made of 'consciousness/ of what then
is it made? Matter we know, and thought we
know, and conscious content we know, but
neutral and simple 'pure experience' is some
thing we know not at all. Say what it consists
of — for it must consist of something — or be
willing to give it up!"

To this challenge the reply is easy. Although
for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this
article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now
to say that there is no general stuff of which ex
perience at large is made. There are as many
stuffs as there are 'natures' in the things expe
rienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure
experience is made of, the answer is always the

Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. I, p.
253, May 12, 1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to the matter.
[See below, pp. 52 ff.]

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

same : *" It is made of that , of just what appearsK
of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness,
heaviness, or what not."1 Shadworth Hodg
son's analysis here leaves nothing to be de
sired.1 Experience is only a collective name^
for all these sensible natures, and save for time
and space (and, if you like, for 'being') there
appears no universal element of which all
things are made.

The next objection is more formidable, in
fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears
it first.

"If it be the self -same piece of pure ex
perience, taken twice over, that serves now as
thought and now as thing" — so the objec
tion runs — "how comes it that its attributes
should differ so fundamentally in the two tak
ings. As thing, the experience is extended; as
thought, it occupies no space or place. As
thing, it is red, hard, heavy; but who ever heard

1 [Cf. Shadworth Hodgson: The Metaphysic of Experience, vol. i,
passim ; The Philosophy of Reflection, bk. u, ch. iv, § 3. ED.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

of a red, hard or heavy thought ? Yet even
now you said that an experience is made of
just what appears, and what appears is just
such adjectives. How can the one experience
in its thing-function be made of them, consist
of them, carry them as its own attributes, while
in its thought-function it disowns them and
attributes them elsewhere. There is a self-con
tradiction here from which the radical dualism
of thought and thing is the only truth that can
save us. Only if the thought is one kind of
being can the adjectives exist in it 'intention
ally' (to use the scholastic term); only if the
thing is another kind, can they exist in it con-
stitutively and energetically. No simple sub
ject can take the same adjectives and at one
time be qualified by it, and at another time be
merely 'of it, as of something only meant or
known."

The solution insisted on by this objector, like
many other common-sense solutions, grows
the less satisfactory the more one turns it in
one's mind. To begin with, are thought and
thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said ?

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS* EXIST?

No one denies that they have some categories
in common. Their relations to time are iden
tical. Both, moreover, may have parts (for
psychologists in general treat thoughts as hav
ing them) ; and both may be complex or simple.
Both are of kinds, can be compared, added and
subtracted and arranged in serial orders. All
sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts which
appear incompatible with consciousness, being
as such a bare diaphaneity. For instance, they
are natural and easy, or laborious. They are
beautiful, happy, intense, interesting, wise,
idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused,
vague, precise, rational, casual, general, par
ticular, and many things besides. Moreover,
the chapters on 'Perception' in the psycho
logy-books are full of facts that make for the
essential homogeneity of thought with thing.
How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated
'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no
attributes in common, could it be so hard to
tell, in a presented and recognized material
object, what part comes in through the sense-
organs and what part comes 'out of one's own

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

head'? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse
here so intimately that you can no more tell
where one begins and the other ends, than you
can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas
that have lately been exhibited, where the real
foreground and the painted canvas join to
gether.1

Descartes for the first time defined thought
as the absolutely unextended, and later philo
sophers have accepted the description as cor
rect. But what possible meaning has it to say
/that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square
yard, extension is not attributable to our
thought? Of every extended object the ade
quate mental picture must have all the exten
sion of the object itself. The difference be-
\jtween objective and subjective extension is
\one of relation to a context solely. In the mind
the various extents maintain no necessarily
stubborn order relatively to each other, while

1 Spencer's proof of his 'Transfigured Realism* (his doctrine that
there is an absolutely non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendid
instance of the impossibility of establishing radical heterogeneity
between thought and thing. All his painfully accumulated points of
difference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of excep
tions. [Cf. Spencer: Principles of Psychology, part vn, ch. xix.]

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

in the physical world they bound each other
stably, and, added together, make the great
enveloping Unit which we believe in and call
real Space. As 'outer,' they carry themselves
adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude
one another and maintain their distances;
while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and they
form a durcheinander in which unity is lost.1
But to argue from this that inner experience is
absolutely inextensive seems to me little short
of absurd. The two worlds differ, not by the
presence or absence of extension, but by the
relations of the extensions which in both
worlds exist.

Does not this case of extension now put us
on the track of truth in the case of other quali
ties? It does; and I am surprised that the facts
should not have been noticed long ago. Why,
for example, do we call a fire hot, and water
wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental
state, when it is 'of ' these objects, is either wet
or hot? 'Intentionally,' at any rate, and when

1 I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind plays
freely with its materials. Of course the mind's free play is restricted
when it seeks to copy real things in real space.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and
wetness are in it just as much as they are in the
physical experience. The reason is this, that,
as the general chaos of all our experiences gets
sifted, we find that there are some fires that
will always burn sticks and always warm our
bodies, and that there are some waters that
will always put out fires; while there are other
fires and waters that will not act at all. The
general group of experiences that act, that do
not only possess their natures intrinsically, but
wear them adjectively and energetically, turn
ing them against one another, comes inevitably
to be contrasted with the group whose mem
bers, having identically the same natures, fail
to manifest them in the ' energetic' way.1 I
make for myself now an experience of blazing
fire; I place it near my body; but it does not
warm me in the least. I lay a stick upon it, and
the stick either burns or remains green, as I
please. I call up water, and pour it on the fire,
and absolutely no difference ensues. I account

1 [But there are also "mental activity trains," in which thoughts
do "work on each other." Cf. below, p. 184, note. ED.]

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

for all such facts by calling this whole train
of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental
fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental wa
ter is what won't necessarily (though of course
it may) put out even a mental fire. Mental
knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real
wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their
points won't wound. With 'real' objects, on /
the contrary, consequences always accrue; and ^
thus the real experiences get sifted from the
mental ones, the things from our thoughts of
them, fanciful or true, and precipitated to
gether as the stable part of the whole experi
ence-chaos, under the name of the physica
world. Of this our perceptual experiences are
the nucleus, they being the originally strong
experiences. We add a lot of conceptual expe
riences to them, making these strong also in
imagination, and building out the remoter
parts of the physical world by their means;
and around this core of reality the world
of laxly connected fancies and mere rhapso
dical objects floats like a bank of clouds.
In the clouds, all sorts of rules are violated

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

which in the core are kept. Extensions there
can be indefinitely located; motion there obeys
no Newton's laws.

VII

There is a peculiar class of experiences to
which, whether we take them as subjective or
as objective, we assign their several natures as
attributes, because in both contexts they affect
their associates actively, though in neither
quite as 'strongly' or as sharply as things af
fect one another by their physical energies. I
refer here to appreciations, which form an am-
biguous sphere of being, belonging with emotion
on the one hand, and having objective 'value'
on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor
quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but
had not made itself complete.1

Experiences of painful objects, for example,
are usually also painful experiences; percep
tions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass
muster as lovely or as ugly perceptions; intui
tions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions.

1 [This topic is resumed below, pp. 137 ff. ED.]
34

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS' EXIST?

Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncer
tain where to fix itself. Shall we speak
seductive visions or of visions of seductive
things? Of wicked desires or of desires for
wickedness ?'t Of healthy thoughts or of thoughts
of healthy objects? Of good impulses, or of
impulses towards the good? Of feelings of
anger, or of angry feelings? Both in the mind
and in the thing, these natures modify their
context, exclude certain associates and deter
mine others, have their mates and incompati-
bles. Yet not as stubbornly as in the case of
physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness,
love and hatred, pleasant and painful can, in
certain complex experiences, coexist.

If one were to make an evolutionary con-
struction of how a lot of originally chaotic pure
experiences became gradually differentiated
into an orderly inner and outer world, the
whole theory would turn upon one's success in
explaining how or why the quality of an expe
rience, once active, could become less so, and,
from being an energetic attribute in some
cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

;, inert or merely internal 'nature/ This would

. be the 'evolution' of the psychical from the

bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic,

moral and otherwise emotional experiences

would represent a halfway stage.

VIII

But a last cry of non possumus will probably
go up from many readers. "All very pretty as
a piece of ingenuity," they will say, "but our
consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you.
We, for our part, know that we are conscious.
We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us,
in absolute contrast with the objects which it
so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faith-
i less to this immediate intuition. The dualism
I is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what
God has put asunder."

My reply to this is my last word, and I
greatly grieve that to many it will sound ma
terialistic. I can not help that, however, for
I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey
them. Let the case be what it may in others, I
am as confident as I am of anything that, in

DOES 'CONSCIOUSNESS* EXIST?

myself, 'the stream of thinking (which I recog
nize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a
careless name for what, when scrutinized, re
veals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of
my breathing. J The 'I think' which Kant said\
must be able to accompany all my objects, is 1
the 'I breathe' which actually does accom- /
pany them. There are other internal facts
besides breathing] (intracephalic muscular ad
justments, etc., of which I have said a word in
my larger Psychology) ,[ and these increase the /
assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is
subject to immediate perception; -1 but] breath,
which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath
moving outwards, between the glottis and the
nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of
which philosophers have constructed the en
tity known to them as consciousness, j That
entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete
are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are
made of the same stuff as things are.

I wish I might believe myself to have made

1 [Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 299-305. Cf. below, pp. 169-
171 (note).]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

that plausible in this article. In another article
I shall try to make the general notion of a
world composed of pure experiences still more
clear.

A WORLD OF PURE EXPERI
ENCE1

IT is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in
the philosophic atmosphere of the time, a
loosening of old landmarks, a softening of op
positions, a mutual borrowing from one an
other on the part of systems anciently closed,
and an interest in new suggestions, however
vague, as if the one thing sure were the inade
quacy of the extant school-solutions. The dis
satisfaction with these seems due for the most
part to a feeling that they are too abstract and
academic. Life is confused and superabundant,
and what the younger generation appears to
crave is more of the temperament of life .in its
philosophy, even though it were at some cost
of logical rigor and of formal purity. Tran-

1 [Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scien
tific Methods, vol. 1, 1904, No. 20, September 29, and No. 21, October
13. Pp. 52-76 have also been reprinted, with some omissions, alter
ations and additions, .in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 102-120. The
alterations have been adopted in the present text. This essay is re
ferred to in A Pluralistic Universe, p. 280, note 5. ED.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

scendental idealism is inclining to let the world
wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute
Subject and his unity of purpose. Berkeley an
idealism is abandoning the principle of parsi
mony and dabbling in panpsychic specula
tions. Empiricism flirts with teleology; and,
strangest of all, natural realism, so long de
cently buried, raises its head above the turf,
and finds glad hands outstretched from the
most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet
again. We are all biased by our personal feel
ings, I know, and I am personally discontented
with extant solutions; so I seem to read the
signs of a great unsettlement, as if the up
heaval of more real conceptions and more fruit
ful methods were imminent, as if a true land
scape might result, less clipped, straight-edged
and artificial.

If philosophy be really on the eve of any con
siderable rearrangement, the time should be
propitious for any one who has suggestions of
his own to bring forward. For many years past
my mind has been growing into a certain type
of Weltanschauung. Rightly or wrongly, I have

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

got to the point where I can hardly see things
in any other pattern. I propose, therefore, to
describe the pattern as clearly as I can con
sistently with great brevity, and to throw my
description into the bubbling vat of publicity
where, jostled by rivals and torn by critics, it
will eventually either disappear from notice,
or else, if better luck befall it, quietly subside
to the profundities, and serve as a possible
ferment of new growths or a nucleus of new
crystallization.

I. RADICAL EMPIRICISM

I give the name of 'radical empiricism' to
my Weltanschauung. Empiricism is known as
the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends
to emphasize universals and to make wholes
prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in
that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary,
lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the
element, the individual, and treats the whole
as a collection and the universal as an abstrac
tion. My description of things, accordingly,
starts with the parts and makes of the whole

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

a being of the second order. It is essentially
a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural
facts, like that of Hume and his descendants,
who refer these facts neither to Substances in
which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind
that creates them as its objects. But it differs
from the Humian type of empiricism in one
particular which makes me add the epithet
radical.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither
admit into its constructions any element that
is not directly experienced, nor exclude from
them any element that is directly experienced.
For such a philosophy, the relations that connect
experiences must themselves be experienced rela
tions, and any kind of relation experienced must
be accounted as 'real* as anything else in the
system. Elements may indeed be redistributed,
the original placing of things getting corrected,
but a real place must be found for every kind
of thing experienced, whether term or relation,
in the final philosophic arrangement.

Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the
fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

present themselves as being fully co-ordinate
parts of experience, has always shown a ten
dency to do away with the connections of
things, and to insist most on the disjunctions.
Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that
whatever things we distinguish are as * loose
and separate' as if they had "no manner of con
nection,' James Mill's denial that similars have
anything ' really' in common, the resolution
of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John
Mill's account of both physical things and
selves as composed of discontinuous possibili
ties, and the general 'pulverization of all Ex
perience by association and the mind-dust
theory, are examples of what I mean.1

The natural result of such a world-picture
has been the efforts of rationalism to correct
its incoherencies by the addition of trans-
experiential agents of unification, substances,
intellectual categories and powers, or Selves;

1 [Cf. Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction;
Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect, vn,
part ii (Selby-Bigge's edition, p. 74); James Mill: Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind.ch. vni; J. S. Mill: An Examination of
Sir William Hamilton s Philosophy, ch. xi, xii; W. K. Clifford: Lec
tures and Essays, pp. 274 ff.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

whereas, if empiricism had only been radical
and taken everything that comes without dis
favor, conjunction as well as separation, each
at its face value, the results would have called
for no such artificial correction. Radical em-
piricism, as I understand it, does full justice to
conjunctive relations, without, however, treat
ing them as rationalism always tends to treat
them, as being true in some supernal way, as if
the unity of things and their variety belonged
to different orders of truth and vitality alto
gether.

II. CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS

Relations are of different degrees of inti
macy. Merely to be 'with' one another in a
universe of discourse is the most external rela
tion that terms can have, and seems to involve
nothing whatever as to farther consequences.
Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and
then space-adjacency and distance. After
them, similarity and difference, carrying the
possibility of many inferences. Then relations

of activity, tying terms into series involving

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

change, tendency, resistance, and the causal
order generally. Finally, the relation experi
enced between terms that form states of mind,
and are immediately conscious of continuing
each other. The organization of the Self as a
system of memories, purposes, strivings, ful
filments or disappointments, is incidental to
this most intimate of all relations, the terms
of which seem in many cases actually to corn-
penetrate and suffuse each other's being.1

Philosophy has always turned on grammati
cal particles. With, near, next, like, from,
towards, against, because, for, through, my —
these words designate types of conjunctive
relation arranged in a roughly ascending order
of intimacy and inclusiveness. A priori, we can
imagine a universe of withness but no nextness;
or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likeness
with no activity, or of activity with no pur
pose, or of purpose with no ego. These would
be universes, each with its own grade of unity.
The universe of human experience is, by one or
another of its parts, of each and all these grades.

1 [See "The Experience of Activity," below, pp. 155-189.]
45

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Whether or not it possibly enjoys some still
more absolute grade of union does not appear
upon the surface.

Taken as it does appear, our universe is to a
large extent chaotic. No one single type of con
nection runs through all the experiences that
compose it. If we take space-relations, they
fail to connect minds into any regular system.
Causes and purposes obtain only among spe
cial series of facts. The self-relation seems
extremely limited and does not link two differ
ent selves together. Prima facie, if you should
liken the universe of absolute idealism to an
aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish
are swimming, you would have to compare the
empiricist universe to something more like one
of those dried human heads with which the
Dyaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull
forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feath
ers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appen
dices of every description float and dangle
from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem
to have nothing to do with one another. Even
so my experiences and yours float and dangle,

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

terminating, it is true, in a nucleus of common
perception, but for the most part out of sight
and irrelevant and unimaginable to one an
other. This imperfect intimacy, this bare re
lation of wiihness between some parts of the
sum total of experience and other parts, is the
fact that ordinary empiricism over-emphasizes
against rationalism, the latter always tending
to ignore it unduly. Radical empiricism, on
the contrary, is fair to both the unity and the
disconnection. It finds no reason for treating
either as illusory. It allots to each its definite
sphere of description, and agrees that there
appear to be actual forces at work which tend,
as time goes on, to make the unity greater.

The conjunctive relation that has given
most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious
transition, so to call it, by which one experience
passes into another when both belong to the
same self. About the facts there is no ques
tion. My experiences and your experiences are
'with' each other in various external ways, but
mine pass into mine, and yours pass into yours
in a way in which yours and mine never pass

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

into one another. Within each of our personal
histories, subject, object, interest and purpose
are continuous or may be continuous.1 Personal
histories are processes of change in time, and '
the change itself is one of the things immediately
experienced. 'Change' in this case means con
tinuous as opposed to discontinuous transi
tion. But continuous transition is one sort of a .
conjunctive relation; and to be a radical em
piricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive
relation of all others, for this is the strategic
point, the position through which, if a hole be
made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all
the metaphysical fictions pour into our philo
sophy. The holding fast to this relation means
taking it at its face value, neither less nor more ;
and to take it at its face value means first of
all to take it just as we feel it, and not to con
fuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, in
volving words that drive us to invent second
ary conceptions in order to neutralize their

1 The psychology books have of late described the facts here with
approximate adequacy. I may refer to the chapters on ' The Stream of
Thought ' and on the Self in my own Principles of Psychology, as well
as to S. H. Hodgson's Metaphysic of Experience, vol. I, ch. vn and vui.

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

suggestions and to make our actual experience
again seem rationally possible.
^ What I do feel simply when a later moment
of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that
though they are two moments, the transition
from the one to the other is continuous.? Con
tinuity here is a definite sort of experience; just
as definite as is the discontinuity-experience
which I find it impossible to avoid when I seek
to make the transition from an experience of
my own to one of yours. In this latter case I ^

have to get on and off again, to pass from a W"
thing lived to another thing only conceived,
and the break is positively experienced and
noted. Though the functions exerted by my
experience and by yours may be the same (e. g.,
the same objects known and the same purposes
followed), yet the sameness has in this case to
be ascertained expressly (and often with diffi
culty and uncertainty) after the break has been
felt; whereas in passing from one of my own
moments to another the sameness of object and
interest is unbroken, and both the earlier and
the later experience are of things directly lived.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

There is no other nature, no other whatness
than this absence of break and this sense of
continuity in that most intimate of all conjunc
tive relations, the passing of one experience
into another when they belong to the same self.
And this whatness is real empirical 'content,'
just as the whatness of separation and discon
tinuity is real content in the contrasted case.
Practically to experience one's personal contin
uum in this living way is to know the originals
of the ideas of continuity and of sameness, to
know what the words stand for concretely, to
own all that they can ever mean. But all expe
riences have their conditions; and over-subtle
intellects, thinking about the facts here, and
asking how they are possible, have ended by
substituting a lot of static objects of con
ception for the direct perceptual experiences.
"Sameness," they have said, "must be a stark
numerical identity; it can't run on from next to
next. Continuity can't mean mere absence of
gap; for if you say two things are in immediate
contact, at the contact how can they be two?
If, on the other hand, you put a relation of

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

transition between them, that itself is a third
thing, and needs to be related or hitched to its
terms. An infinite series is involved," and so
on. The result is that from difficulty to diffi
culty, the plain conjunctive experience has
been discredited by both schools, the empiri
cists leaving things permanently disjoined, and
the rationalist remedying the looseness by their
Absolutes or Substances, or whatever other fic
titious agencies of union they may have em
ployed.1 From all which artificiality we can
be saved by a couple of simple reflections : first,
that conjunctions and separations are, at all
events, co-ordinate phenomena which, if we
take experiences at their face value, must be
accounted equally real; and second, that if we
insist on treating things as really separate
when they are given as continuously joined
invoking, when union is required, transcen
dental principles to overcome the separateness
we have assumed, then we ought to stand
ready to perform the converse act. We ought
to invoke higher principles of disunion, also, to

1 [See "The Thing and its Relations," below, pp. 92-122.]
51

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

make our merely experienced disjunctions more
truly real. Failing thus, we ought to let the
originally given continuities stand on their own
bottom. We have no right to be lopsided or to
blow capriciously hot and cold.

III. THE COGNITIVE RELATION

The first great pitfall from which such a radi
cal standing by experience will save us is an
artificial conception of the relations between
knower and known. Throughout the history of
philosophy the subject and its object have been
treated as absolutely discontinuous entities;
and thereupon the presence of the latter to the
former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of
the latter, has assumed a paradoxical charac
ter which all sorts of theories had to be in
vented to overcome. Representative theories
put a mental 'representation/ 'image/ or
* content ' into the gap, as a sort of inter
mediary. Common-sense theories left the gap
untouched, declaring our mind able to clear
it by a self -transcending leap. Transcenden-

talist theories left it impossible to traverse by

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to
perform the saltatory act. All the while, in
the very bosom of the finite experience, every
conjunction required to make the relation in
telligible is given in full. Either the knower
and the known are:

(1) the self-same piece of experience taken
twice over in different contexts; or they are

(2) two pieces of actual experience belong
ing to the same subject, with definite tracts of
conjunctive transitional experience between
them; or

(3) the known is a possible experience either
of that subject or another, to which the said
conjunctive transitions would lead, if suffi
ciently prolonged.

To discuss all the ways in which one ex
perience may function as the knower of an
other, would be incompatible with the limits
of this essay.1 I have just treated of type 1, the

1 For brevity's sake I altogether omit mention of the type con
stituted by knowledge of the truth of general propositions. This type
has been thoroughly and, so far as I can see, satisfactorily, elucidated
in Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory. Such propositions are reducible
to the S-is-P form; and the 'terminus' that verifies and fulfils is the
SP in combination. Of course percepts may be involved in the medi-

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

kind of knowledge called perception.1 This is
the type of case in which the mind enjoys di
rect 'acquaintance' with a present object. In
the other types the mind has 'knowledge-
about' an object not immediately there. Of
type 2, the simplest sort of conceptual know
ledge, I have given some account in two
[earlier] articles.2 Type 3 can always formally
and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so
that a brief description of that type will put
the present reader sufficiently at my point
of view, and make him see what the actual
meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation
may be.

Suppose me to be sitting here in my library

ating experiences, or in the 'satisfactoriness' of the P in its new
position.

1 [See above, pp. 9-15.]

2 ["On the Function of Cognition," Mind, vol. x, 1885, and "The
Knowing of Things Together," Psychological Review, vol. n, 1895.
These articles are reprinted, the former in full, the latter in part, in The
Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-50. ED.] These articles and their doctrine,
unnoticed apparently by any one else, have lately gained favorable com
ment from Professor Strong. [" A Naturalistic Theory of the Refer
ence of Thought to Reality," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. i, 1904.] Dr. Dickinson S. Miller has independ
ently thought out the same results ["The Meaning of Truth and Error,"
Philosophical Review, vol. n, 1893; "The Confusion of Function and
Content in Mental Analysis," Psychological Review, vol. n, 1895],
which Strong accordingly dubs the James-Miller theory of cognition.

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

at Cambridge, at ten minutes' walk from
'Memorial Hall,' and to be thinking truly of
the latter object. My mind may have before
it only the name, or it may have a clear image,
or it may have a very dim image of the hall, but
such intrinsic differences in the image make no
difference in its cognitive function. Certain
extrinsic phenomena, special experiences of
conjunction, are what impart to the image, be
it what it may, its knowing office.

For instance, if you ask me what hall I mean
by my image, and I can tell you nothing; or if I
fail to point or lead you towards the Harvard
Delta; or if, being led by you, I am uncertain
whether the Hall I see be what I had in mind
or not; you would rightly deny that I had
'meant' that particular hall at all, even though
my mental image might to some degree have
resembled it. The resemblance would count in
that case as coincidental merely, for all sorts
of things of a kind resemble one another in this
world without being held for that reason to
take cognizance of one another.

On the other hand, if I can lead you to the
55

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

hall, and tell you of its history and present
uses; if in its presence I feel my idea, however
imperfect it may have been, to have led hither
and to be now terminated; if the associates of
the image and of the felt hall run parallel, so
that each term of the one context corresponds
serially, as I walk, with an answering term of
the others; why then my soul was prophetic,
and my idea must be, and by common consent
would be, called cognizant of reality. That per
cept was what I meant, for into it my idea has
passed by conjunctive experiences of sameness
and fulfilled intention. Nowhere is there jar,
but every later moment continues and corrobo
rates an earlier one.

rin this continuing and corroborating, taken
in no transcendental sense, but denoting de
finitely felt transitions, lies all that the knowing
of a percept by an idea can possibly contain or
signify. Wherever such transitions are felt, the
first experience knows the last one. Where they
do not, or where even as possibles they can not,
intervene, there can be no pretence of knowing.
In this latter case the extremes will be con-

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

nected, if connected at all, by inferior relations
— bare likeness or succession, or by 'withness'
alone. Knowledge of sensible realities thus
comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It J
is made ; and made by relations that unrol1
themselves in time. Whenever certain inter
mediaries are given, such that, as they develop
towards their terminus, there is experience
from point to point of one direction followed,
and finally of one process fulfilled, the result^
is that their starting-point thereby becomes a
knower and their terminus an object meant or
known. That is all that knowing (in the sim
ple case considered) can be known-as, that is
the whole of its nature, put into experiential
terms. Whenever such is the sequence of our
experiences we may freely say that we had the
terminal object 'in mind ' from the outset, even
although at the outset nothing was there in us
but a flat piece of substantive experience like
any other, with no self -transcendency about it,
and no mystery save the mystery of coming
into existence and of being gradually followed
by other pieces of substantive experience, with

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

conjunctively transitional experiences between.
That is what we mean here by the object's
being 'in mind.' Of any deeper more real way
of being in mind we have no positive concep
tion, and we have no right to discredit our
actual experience by talking of such a way
at all.

I know that many a reader will rebel at this.
"Mere intermediaries," he will say, "even
though they be feelings of continuously grow
ing fulfilment, only separate the knower from
the known, whereas' what we have in knowledge
is a kind of immediate touch of the one by the
other, an * apprehension ' in the etymological
sense of the word, a leaping of the chasm as by
lightning, an act by which two terms are smit
ten into one, over the head of their distinct
ness. All these dead intermediaries of yours
are out of each other, and outside of their
termini still."

But do not such dialectic difficulties remind
us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping
at its image in the water? If we knew any more
real kind of union aliunde, we might be entitled

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

to brand all our empirical unions as a sham.
But unions by continuous transition are the
only ones we know of, whether in this matter
of a knowledge-about that terminates in an
acquaintance, whether in personal identity, hi
logical predication through the copula 'is/ or
elsewhere. If anywhere there were more" ab
solute unions realized, they could only reveal
themselves to us by just such conjunctive
results. These are what the unions are worth,
these are all that we can ever practically mean
by union, by continuity. Is it not time to
repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to
act like one is to be one ? 1 Should we not say
here that to be experienced as continuous is to
be really continuous, in a world where experi
ence and reality come to the same thing ? In
a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to
hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will
hold a painted ship. In a world where both the
terms and their distinctions are affairs of ex
perience, conjunctions that are experienced
must be at least as real as anything else. They

1 [Cf. H. Lotze: MdaphysiJc. §§ 37-39, 97. 98, 243.]
59

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

will be * absolutely ' real conjunctions, if we have
no transphenomenal Absolute ready, to dereal-
ize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke.
If, on the other hand, we had such an Absolute,
not one of our opponents' theories of knowl
edge could remain standing any better than
ours could; for the distinctions as well as the
conjunctions of experience would impartially
fall its prey. The whole question of how 'one*
thing can know 'another' would cease to be a
real one at all in a world where otherness itself
was an illusion.1

So much for the essentials of the cognitive
relation, where the knowledge is conceptual in
type, or forms knowledge 'about' an object. It
consists in intermediary experiences (possible,
if not actual) of continuously developing pro
gress, and, finally, of fulfilment, when the sen
sible percept, which is the object, is reached.
The percept here not only verifies the concept,
proves its function of knowing that percept to

1 Mr. Bradley, not professing to know his absolute aliunde, never
theless derealizes Experience by alleging it to be everywhere infected
with self-contradiction. His arguments seem almost purely verbal,
but this is no place for arguing that point out. [Cf. F. H. Bradley;
Appearance and Reality, passim; and below, pp. 106-122.]

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

be true, but the percept's existence as the
terminus of the chain of intermediaries creates
the function. Whatever terminates that chain
was, because it now proves itself to be, what
the concept "had in mind.'

The towering importance for human life of
this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an
experience that knows another can figure as
its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous
'epistemological' sense, but in the definite
practical sense of being its substitute in various
operations, sometimes physical and sometimes
mental, which lead us to its associates and re
sults. By experimenting on our ideas of reality,
we may save ourselves the trouble of experi
menting on the real experiences which they
severally mean. The ideas form related sys
tems, corresponding point for point to the sys
tems which the realities form; and by letting an
ideal term call up its associates systematically,
we may be led to a terminus which the corre
sponding real term would have led to in case
we had operated on the real world. And this
brings us to the general question of substitution.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

IV.' SUBSTITUTION

In Taine's brilliant book on 'Intelligence/
substitution was for the first time named as
a cardinal logical function, though of course
the facts had always been familiar enough.
What, exactly, in a system of experiences, does
the 'substitution ' of one of them for another
mean?

According to my view, experience as a whole
is a process in time, whereby innumerable
particular terms lapse and are superseded by
others that follow upon them by transitions
which, whether disjunctive or conjunctive in
content, are themselves experiences, and must
in general be accounted at least as real as
the terms which they relate. What the nature
of the event called 'superseding' signifies, de
pends altogether on the kind of transition
that obtains. Some experiences simply abolish
their predecessors without continuing them
in any way. Others are felt to increase or to
enlarge their meaning, to carry out their pur
pose, or to bring us nearer to their goal. They

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

'represent' them, and may fulfil their function
better than they fulfilled it themselves. But
'fulfil a function' in a world of pure experience
can be conceived and defined in only one pos
sible way. In such a world transitions and
arrivals (or terminations) are the only events
that happen, though they happen by so many
sorts of path. The only function that one ex
perience can perform is to lead into another
experience; and the only fulfilment we can
speak of is the reaching of a certain experi- I 7\
enced end. When one experience leads to (6T
can lead to) the same end as another, they
agree in function. But the whole system of
experiences as they are immediately given
presents itself as a quasi-chaos through which
one can pass out of an initial term in many
directions and yet end in the same terminus,
moving from next to next by a great many
possible paths.

Either one of these paths might be a func
tional substitute for another, and to follow one
rather than another might on occasion be|
an advantageous thing to do. As a matter of

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

fact, and in a general way, the paths that
run through conceptual experiences, that is,
through 'thoughts' or 'ideas' that 'know' the
things in which they terminate, are highly ad
vantageous paths to follow. Not only do they
yield inconceivably rapid transitions; but, ow
ing to the ' universal ' character l which they
frequently possess, and to their capacity for
association with one another in great systems,
they outstrip the tardy consecutions of the
things themselves, and sweep us on towards
our ultimate termini in a far more labor-saving
way than the following of trains of sensible
perception ever could. Wonderful are the new
cuts and the short-circuits which the thought-
paths make. Most thought-paths, it is true,
are substitutes for nothing actual; they end
outside the real world altogether, in way
ward fancies, Utopias, fictions or mistakes. But
where they do re-enter reality and terminate
therein, we substitute them always; and with

1 Of which all that need be said in this essay is that it also can be
conceived as functional, and defined in terms of transitions, or of the
possibliity of such. [Cf. Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp. 473-480,
vol. ii, pp. 337-340; Pragmatism, p. 265; Some Problems of Philoso
phy, pp. 63-74; Meaning of Truth, pp. 246-247, etc. ED.]

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

these substitutes we pass the greater number
of our hours.

This is why I called our experiences, taken
all together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly
more discontinuity in the sum total of experi
ences than we commonly suppose. The objec
tive nucleus of every man's experience, his own
body, is, it is true, a continuous percept; and
equally continuous as a percept (though we
may be inattentive to it) is the material en
vironment of that body, changing by gradual
transition when the body moves. But the
distant parts of the physical world are at all
times absent from us, and form conceptual
objects merely, into the perceptual reality of
which our life inserts itself at points discrete
and relatively rare. Round their several ob
jective nuclei, partly shared and common and
partly discrete, of the real physical world, in
numerable thinkers, pursuing their several lines
of physically true cogitation, trace paths that
intersect one another only at discontinuous
perceptual points, and the rest of the time are
quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

of shared 'reality,' as around the Dyak's head
of my late metaphor, floats the vast cloud of
experiences that are wholly subjective, that
are non-substitutional, that find not even an
eventual ending for themselves in the per
ceptual world — the mere day-dreams and
joys and sufferings and wishes of the individ
ual minds. These exist with one another, in
deed, and with the objective nuclei, but out
of them it is probable that to all eternity no
interrelated system of any kind will ever be
made.

This notion of the purely substitutional or
conceptual physical world brings us to the most
critical of all the steps in the development of
a philosophy of pure experience. The paradox
of self -transcendency in knowledge comes back
upon us here, but I think that our notions of
pure experience and of substitution, and our
radically empirical view of conjunctive transi
tions, are DenJcmittel that will carry us safely
through the pass.

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

V. WHAT OBJECTIVE REFERENCE Is.

Whosoever feels his experience to be some
thing substitutional even while he has it, may
be said to have an experience that reaches
beyond itself. From inside of its own entity it
says 'more/ and postulates reality existing else
where. For the transcendentalist, who holds
knowing to consist in a salto mortale across an
' epistemological chasm,' such an idea presents
no difficulty; but it seems at first sight as if it
might be inconsistent with an empiricism like
our own. Have we not explained that con
ceptual knowledge is made such wholly by the
existence of things that fall outside of the
knowing experience itself — by intermediary
experiences and by a terminus that fulfils ?
Can the knowledge be there before these ele
ments that constitute its being have come ?
And, if knowledge be not there, how can ob
jective reference occur ?

The key to this difficulty lies in the distinc
tion between knowing as verified and com
pleted, and the same knowing as in transit

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

and on its way. To recur to the Memorial
Hall example lately used, it is only when our
idea of the Hall has actually terminated in the
percept that we know 'for certain' that from
the beginning it was truly cognitive of that.
Until established by the end of the process, its
quality of knowing that, or indeed of knowing
anything, could still be doubted; and yet the
knowing really was there, as the result now
shows. We were virtual knowers of the Hall
long before we were certified to have been its
actual know^ers, by the percept's retroactive
validating power. Just so we are ' mortal' all
the time, by reason of the virtuality of the
inevitable event which will make us so when
it shall have come.

Now the immensely greater part of all our
knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage.
It never is completed or nailed down. I speak
not merely of our ideas of imperceptibles like
ether-waves or dissociated 'ions,' or of 'ejects'
like the contents of our neighbors' minds; I
speak also of ideas which we might verify if we
would take the trouble, but which we hold for

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

true although unterminated perceptually, be
cause nothing says 'no 'to us, and there is no
contradicting truth in sight. To continue think
ing unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a
hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in
the completed sense. As each experience runs by
cognitive transition into the next one, and we
nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere
count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to
the current as if the port were sure. We live,
as it were, upon the front edge of an advanc
ing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate
direction in falling forward is all we cover of
the future of our path. It is as if a differential
quotient should be conscious and treat itself as
an adequate substitute for a traced-out curve.
Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of
rate and of direction, and lives in these transi
tions more than in the journey's end. The ex
periences of tendency are sufficient to act upon
— what more could we have done at those
moments even if the later verification comes
complete ?

This is what, as a radical empiricist, I say to
69

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the charge that the objective reference which
is so flagrant a character of our experiences in
volves a chasm and a mortal leap. A positively
conjunctive transition involves neither chasm
nor leap. Being the very original of what we
mean by continuity, it makes a continuum
wherever it appears. I know full well that such
brief words as these will leave the hardened
transcendentalist unshaken. Conjunctive expe
riences separate their terms, he will still say : they
are third things interposed, that have them
selves to be conjoined by new links, and to in
voke them makes our trouble infinitely worse.
To 'feel' our motion forward is impossible.
Motion implies terminus; and how can termi
nus be felt before we have arrived? The barest
start and sally forwards, the barest tendency
to leave the instant, involves the chasm and
the leap. Conjunctive transitions are the most
superficial of appearances, illusions of our sensi
bility which philosophical reflection pulverizes
at a touch. Conception is our only trust
worthy instrument, conception and the Abso
lute working hand in hand. Conception dis-

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

integrates experience utterly, but its disjunc
tions are easily overcome again when the Abso
lute takes up the task.

Such transcendentalists I must leave, pro
visionally at least, in full possession of their
creed.1 I have no space for polemics in this
article, so I shall simply formulate the empiri
cist doctrine as my hypothesis, leaving it to
work or not work as it may.

Objective reference, I say then, is an inci
dent of the fact that so much of our experi
ence comes as an insufficient and consists of
process and transition. Our fields of experience
have no more definite boundaries than have
our fields of view. Both are fringed forever by
a more that continuously develops, and that
continuously supersedes them as life proceeds.
The relations, generally speaking, are as real
here as the terms are, and the only complaint
of the transcendentalisms with which I could
at all sympathize would be his charge that, by
first making knowledge to consist in external
relations as I have done, and by then confess-

1 [Cf. below, pp. 93 ff.J
71

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ing that nine-tenths of the time these are
not actually but only virtually there, I have
knocked the solid bottom out of the whole
business, and palmed off a substitute of know
ledge for the genuine thing. Only the admis
sion, such a critic might say, that our ideas are
self -transcendent and 'true' already, in ad
vance of the experiences that are to terminate
them, can bring solidity back to knowledge
in a world like this, in which transitions and
terminations are only by exception fulfilled.

This seems to me an excellent place for
applying the pragmatic method. When a
dispute arises, that method consists in augur
ing what practical consequences would be
different if one side rather than the other were
true. If no difference can be thought of, the
dispute is a quarrel over words. What then
would the self -transcendency affirmed to exist
in advance of all experiential mediation or
termination, be known-as? What would it
practically result in for us, were it true ?

It could only result in our orientation, in the
turning of our expectations and practical ten-

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

dencies into the right path; and the right path
here, so long as we and the object are not yet
face to face (or can never get face to face, as in
the case of ejects), would be the path that led
us into the object's nearest neighborhood.
Where direct acquaintance is lacking, 'know
ledge about' is the next best thing, and an
acquaintance with what actually lies about the
object, and is most closely related to it, puts
such knowledge within our grasp. Ether-waves
and your anger, for example, are things in
which my thoughts will never perceptually ter
minate, but my concepts of them lead me to
their very brink, to the chromatic fringes and
to the hurtful words and deeds which are their
really next effects.

Even if our ideas did in themselves carry the
postulated self-transcendency, it would still
remain true that their putting us into pos
session of such effects would be the sole cash-
value of the self-transcendency for us. And this
cash-value, it is needless to say, is verbatim et
literatim what our empiricist account pays in.
On pragmatist principles therefore, a dispute

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

over self-transcendency is a pure logomachy.
Call our concepts of ejective things self-
transcendent or the reverse, it makes no dif
ference, so long as we don't differ about the
nature of that exalted virtue's fruits — fruits
for us, of course, humanistic fruits. If an
Absolute were proved to exist for other rea
sons, it might well appear that his knowledge is
terminated in innumerable cases where ours is
still incomplete. That, however, would be a
fact indifferent to our knowledge. The latter
would grow neither worse nor better, whether
we acknowledged such an Absolute or left him
out.

So the notion of a knowledge still in transitu
and on its way joins hands here with that
notion of a 'pure experience' which I tried to
explain in my [essay] entitled 'Does Con
sciousness Exist?' The instant field of the
present is always experience in its 'pure' state,
plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet
undifferentiated into thing and thought, and
only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as
some one's opinion about fact. This is as true

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

when the field is conceptual as when it is per
ceptual. 'Memorial Hall ' is 'there' in my idea
as much as when I stand before it. I proceed to
act on its account in either case. Only in the
later experience that supersedes the present
one is this naif immediacy retrospectively split
into two parts, a 'consciousness' and its 'con
tent,' and the content corrected or confirmed.
While still pure, or present, any experience —
mine, for example, of what I write about in
these very lines — passes for 'truth.' The
morrow may reduce it to 'opinion.' The trans-
cendentalist in all his particular knowledges is
as liable to this reduction as I am : his Absolute
does not save him. Why, then, need he quarrel
with an account of knowing that merely leaves
it liable to this inevitable condition? Why in
sist that knowing is a static relation out of
time when it practically seems so much a func
tion of our active life? For a thing to be valid,
says Lotze, is the same as to make itself
valid. When the whole universe seems only
to be making itself valid and to be still incom
plete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

all things, should knowing be exempt? Why
should it not be making itself valid like every
thing else? That some parts of it may be al
ready valid or verified beyond dispute, the
empirical philosopher, of course, like any one
else, may always hope.

VI. THE CONTERMINOUSNESS OF DIFFERENT MlNDS 1

With transition and prospect thus enthroned
in pure experience, it is impossible to sub
scribe to the idealism of the English school.
Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affini
ties with natural realism than with the views
of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily
shown.

For the Berkeleyan school, ideas (the verbal
equivalent of what I term experiences) are dis
continuous. The content of each is wholly im
manent, and there are no transitions with
which they are consubstantial and through
which their beings may unite. Your Memorial
Hall and mine, even when both are percepts,
are wholly out of connection with each other.

1 [Cf. " How Two Minds Can Know One Thing," below, pp. 123-136.]

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

Our lives are a congeries of solipsisms, out of *
which in strict logic only a God could compose
a universe even of discourse. No dynamic
currents run between my objects and your
objects. Never can our minds meet in the
same.

The incredibility of such a philosophy is •
flagrant. It is 'cold, strained, and unnatural'
in a supreme degree; and it may be doubted
whether even Berkeley himself, who took it
so religiously, really believed, when walking
through the streets of London, that his spirit
and the spirits of his fellow wayfarers had
absolutely different towns in view.

To me the decisive reason in favor of our
minds meeting in some common objects at least
is that, unless I make that supposition, I have
no motive for assuming that your mind exists
at all. Why do I postulate your mind ? Be
cause I see your body acting in a certain way.
Its gestures, facial movements, words and con
duct generally, are * expressive,' so I deem it
actuated as my own is, by an inner life like
mine. This argument from analogy is my rea-

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

son, whether an instinctive belief runs before it
or not. But what is 'your body' here but a
percept in my field ? It is only as animating
that object, my object, that I have any occasion
to think of you at all. If the body that you
actuate be not the very body that I see there,
but some duplicate body of your own with
which that has nothing to do, we belong to
different universes, you and I, and for me to
speak of you is folly. Myriads of such uni
verses even now may coexist, irrelevant to one
another; my concern is solely with the universe
with which my own life is connected.

r— -

In that perceptual part of my universe which
I call your body, your mind and my mind meet
and may be called conterminous. Your mind
actuates that body and mine sees it ; my
thoughts pass into it as into their harmonious
cognitive fulfilment ; your emotions and voli
tions pass into it as causes into their effects.

But that percept hangs together with all our
other physical percepts. They are of one stuff
with it; and if it be our common possession,

they must be so likewise. For instance, your

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

hand lays hold of one end of a rope and my
hand lays hold of the other end. We pull
against each other. Can our two hands be
mutual objects in this experience, and the rope
not be mutual also? What is true of the rope is
true of any other percept. Your objects are
over and over again the same as mine._y If I
ask you where some object of yours is, our old
Memorial Hall, for example, you point to my
Memorial Hall with your hand which I see. If
you alter an object in your world, put out a
candle, for example, when I am present, my
candle ipso facto goes out. It is only as altering
my objects that I guess you to exist. If your
objects do not coalesce with my objects, if they
be not identically where mine are, they must
be proved to be positively somewhere else.
But no other location can be assigned for them,
so their place must be what it seems to be, the
same.1

» 'Practically, then, our minds meet in a world
of objects which they share in common, which

1 The notion that our objects are inside of our respective heads is
not seriously defensible, so I pass it by.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

would still be there, if one or several of the
minds were destroyed.; I can see no formal
objection to this supposition's being literally
true. On the principles which I am defending,
a 'mind' or 'personal consciousness' is the
name for a series of experiences run together by
certain definite transitions, and an objective
reality is a series of similar experiences knit by
different transitions. If one and the same ex
perience can figure twice, once in a mental and
once in a physical context (as I have tried, in
my article on * Consciousness,' to show that it
can), one does not see why it might not figure
thrice, or four times, or any number of times,
by running into as many different mental con
texts, just as the same point, lying at their
intersection, can be continued into many dif
ferent lines. Abolishing any number of con
texts would not destroy the experience itself
or its other contexts, any more than abolish
ing some of the point's linear continuations
would destroy the others, or destroy the point
itself.

I well know the subtle dialectic which insists
80

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

that a term taken in another relation must
needs be an intrinsically different term. The
crux is always the old Greek one, that the same
man can't be tall in relation to one neighbor,
and short in relation to another, for that would
make him tall and short at once. In this essay
I can not stop to refute this dialectic, so I pass
on, leaving my flank for the time exposed.1
But if my reader will only allow that the same
'now' both ends his past and begins his future;
or that, when he buys an acre of land from his
neighbor, it is the same acre that successively
figures in the two estates; or that when I pay
him a dollar, the same dollar goes into his
pocket that came out of mine; he will also in
consistency have to allow that the same object
may conceivably play a part in, as being re
lated to the rest of, any number of otherwise
entirely different minds. This is enough for
my present point: the common-sense notion of
minds sharing the same object offers no spe
cial logical or epistemological difficulties of its j
own; it stands or falls with the general possibil-

1 [The argument is resumed below, pp. 101 sq. ED.]
81

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ity of things being in conjunctive relation with
other things at all.

In principle, then, let natural realism pass
for possible. Your mind and mine may termi
nate in the same percept, not merely against it,
as if it were a third external thing, but by in
serting themselves into it and coalescing with
it, for such is the sort of conjunctive union that
appears to be experienced when a perceptual
terminus 'fulfils.' Even so, two hawsers may
embrace the same pile, and yet neither one of
them touch any other part except that pile, of
what the other hawser is attached to.

It is therefore not a formal question, but
a question of empirical fact solely, whether,
when you and I are said to know the 'same'
Memorial Hall, our minds do terminate at or in
a numerically identical percept. Obviously, as
a plain matter of fact, they do not. Apart from
color-blindness and such possibilities, we see
the Hall in different perspectives. You may be
on one side of it and I on another. The percept
of each of us, as he sees the surface of the Hall,
is moreover only his provisional terminus. The

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

next thing beyond my percept is not your
mind, but more percepts of my own into which
my first percept develops, the interior of the
Hall, for instance, or the inner structure of its
bricks and mortar. If our minds were in a
literal sense conterminous, neither could get
beyond the percept which they had in com
mon, it would be an ultimate barrier between
them — unless indeed they flowed over it and
became 'co-conscious' over a still larger part
of their content, which (thought-transference
apart) is not supposed to be the case. In point
of fact the ultimate common barrier can always
be pushed, by both minds, farther than any
actual percept of either, until at last it resolves
itself into the mere notion of imperceptibles
like atoms or ether, so that, where we do ter
minate in percepts, our knowledge is only spe
ciously completed, being, in theoretic strict
ness, only a virtual knowledge of those remoter
objects which conception carries out.

Is natural realism, permissible in logic, re
futed then by empirical fact ? Do our minds
have no object in common after all ?

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Yes, they certainly have Space in common.
On pragmatic principles we are obliged to predi
cate sameness wherever we can predicate no
assignable point of difference. If two named
things have every quality and function indis
cernible, and are at the same time in the same
place, they must be written down as numeri
cally one thing under two different names. But
there is no test discoverable, so far as I know,
by which it can be shown that the place occu
pied by your percept of Memorial Hall differs
from the place occupied by mine. The per
cepts themselves may be shown to differ; but
if each of us be asked to point out where his
percept is, we point to an identical spot. All
the relations, whether geometrical or causal, of
the Hall originate or terminate in that spot
wherein our hands meet, and where each of us
begins to work if he wishes to, make the Hall
change before the other's eyes. Just so it is
with our bodies. That body of yours which
you actuate and feel from within must be in
the same spot as the body of yours which I see
or touch from without. 'There' for me means

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

where I place my finger. If you do not feel my
finger's contact to be ' there' in my sense, when
I place it on your body, where then do you feel
it? Your inner actuations of your body meet
my finger there: it is there that you resist its
push, or shrink back, or sweep the finger aside
with your hand. Whatever farther knowledge
either of us may acquire of the real constitu
tion of the body which we thus feel, you from
within and I from without, it is in that same
place that the newly conceived or perceived
constituents have to be located, and it is
through that space that your and my mental
intercourse with each other has always to be
carried on, by the mediation of impressions
which I convey thither, and of the reactions
thence which those impressions may provoke
from you.

In general terms, then, whatever differing
contents our minds may eventually fill a place
with, the place itself is a numerically identical
content of the two minds, a piece of common
property in which, through which, and over
which they join. The receptacle of certain of

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

our experiences being thus common, the ex
periences themselves might some day become
common also. If that day ever did come, our
thoughts would terminate in a complete empir
ical identity, there would be an end, so far as
those experiences went, to our discussions about
truth. No points of difference appearing, they
would have to count as the same.

VII. CONCLUSION

With this we have the outlines of a philo
sophy of pure experience before us. At the out
set of my essay, I called it a mosaic philosophy.
In actual mosaics the pieces are held together
by their bedding, for which bedding the Sub
stances, transcendental Egos, or Absolutes of
other philosophies may be taken to stand. In
radical empiricism there is no bedding; it is as
if the pieces clung together by their edges, the
transitions experienced between them forming
their cement. Of course such a metaphor is
misleading, for in actual experience the more
substantive and the more transitive parts run
into each other continuously, there is in general

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

no separateness needing to be overcome by an
external cement; and whatever separateness
is actually experienced is not overcome, it
stays and counts as separateness to the end.
But the metaphor serves to symbolize the fact
that Experience itself, taken at large, can grow
by its edges. That one moment of it pro
liferates into the next by transitions which,
whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue
the experiential tissue, can not, I contend, be
denied. Life is in the transitions as much as in
the terms connected; often, indeed, it seems to
be there more emphatically, as if our spurts
and sallies forward were the real firing-line of
the battle, were like the thin line of flame ad
vancing across the dry autumnal field which
the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we
live prospectively as well as retrospectively.
It is 'of the past, inasmuch as it comes ex
pressly as the past's continuation; it is 'of ' the
future in so far as the future, when it comes,
will have continued it.

These relations of continuous transition ex
perienced are what make our experiences cog-

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

nitive. In the simplest and completest cases
the experiences are cognitive of one another.
When one of them terminates a previous series
of them with a sense of fulfilment, it, we say,
is what those other experiences 'had in view.'
The knowledge, in such a case, is verified; the
truth is "salted down.' Mainly, however, we
live on speculative investments, or on our pro
spects only. But living on things in posse is
as good as living in the actual, so long as our
credit remains good. It is evident that for the
most part it is good, and that the universe
seldom protests our drafts.

In this sense we at every moment can con
tinue to believe in an existing beyond. It is
only in special cases that our confident rush
forward gets rebuked. The beyond must, of
course, always in our philosophy be itself of an
experiential nature. If not a future experience
of our own or a present one of our neighbor, it
must be a thing in itself in Dr. Prince's and
Professor Strong's sense of the term — that is,
it must be an experience for itself whose rela
tion to other things we translate into the action

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

of molecules, ether-waves, or whatever else the
physical symbols may be.1 This opens the
chapter of the relations of radical empiricism
to panpsychism, into which I can not enter
now.2

The beyond can in any case exist simultane
ously — for it can be experienced to have ex
isted simultaneously — with the experience
that practically postulates it by looking in its
direction, or by turning or changing in the
direction of which it is the goal. Pending that
actuality of union, in the virtuality of which
the € truth,' even now, of the postulation con
sists, the beyond and its knower are entities
split off from each other. The world is in so far \
forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully
experienced as yet. But, as fast as verifications
come, trains of experience, once separate, run
into one another; and that is why I said, earlier

1 Our minds and these ejective realities would still have space (or
pseudo-space, as I believe Professor Strong calls the medium of inter
action between 'things-in-themselves') in common. These would
exist where, and begin to act where, we locate the molecules, etc., and
where we perceive the sensible phenomena explained thereby. [Cf.
Morton Prince: The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism, part I,
ch. in, iv; C. A. Strong: Why the Mind Has a Body. ch. xii.]

2 [Cf. below, p. 188; A Pluralistic Universe. Lect. iv-vn.]

ESS;AYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

in my article, that the unity of the world is on
the whole undergoing increase. The universe
continually grows in quantity by new experi
ences that graft themselves upon the older
mass; but these very new experiences often
help the mass to a more consolidated form.

These are the main features of a philosophy
of pure experience. It has innumerable other
aspects and arouses innumerable questions,
but the points I have touched on seem enough
to make an entering wedge. In my own mind
such a philosophy harmonizes best with a radi
cal pluralism, with novelty and indeterminism,
moralism and theism, and with the 'human
ism' lately sprung upon us by the Oxford and
the Chicago schools.1 I can not, however, be
sure that all these doctrines are its necessary
and indispensable allies. It presents so many
points of difference, both from the common
sense and from the idealism that have made
our philosophic language, that it is almost as

1 I have said something of this latter alliance in an article entitled
'Humanism and Truth/ in Mind, October, 1904. [Reprinted in The
Meaning of Truth, pp. 51-101. Cf. also "Humanism and Truth Once
More," below, pp. 244-265.]

WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE

difficult to state it as it is to think it out
clearly, and if it is ever to grow into a respect
able system, it will have to be built up by the
contributions of many co-operating minds. It
seems to me, as I said at the outset of this es
say, that many minds are, in point of fact, now
turning in a direction that points towards radi
cal empiricism. If they are carried farther by
my words, and if then they add their stronger
voices to my feebler one, the publication of
this essay will have been worth while.

Ill

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS*

EXPERIENCE in its immediacy seems per
fectly fluent. The active sense of living which
we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our in
stinctive world for us, is self-luminous and sug
gests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disap
pointments and uncertainties. They are not
intellectual contradictions.

When the reflective intellect gets at work,
however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in
the flowing process. Distinguishing its ele
ments and parts, it gives them separate names,
and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put
together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irration
ality and revels in its dialectic elaboration.
Other philosophies try, some by ignoring,
some by resisting, and some by turning the
dialectic procedure against itself, negating its
first negations, to restore the fluent sense of

1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. n, No. 2, January 19, 1905. Reprinted also
as Appendix A in A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 347-369. The author's
corrections have been adopted in the present text. ED.]

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

life again, and let redemption take the place of
innocence. The perfection with which any
philosophy may do this is the measure of its
human success and of its importance in philo
sophic history. In [the last essay], 'A World
of Pure Experience,5 I tried my own hand
sketchily at the problem, resisting certain
first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general
way that the immediately experienced con
junctive relations are as real as anything else.
If my sketch is not to appear too naif, I must
come closer to details, and in the present essay
I propose to do so.

'Pure experience' is the name which I gave
to the immediate flux of life which furnishes
the material to "our later reflection with its
conceptual categories. Only new-born babes,
or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, ill
nesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an
experience pure in the literal sense of a that
which is not yet any definite what, tho' ready
to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

and of manyness, but in respects that don't
appear; changing throughout, yet so confus
edly that its phases interpenetrate and no
points, either of distinction or of identity,
can be caught. Pure experience in this state
is but another name for feeling or sensation.
But the flux of it no sooner comes than it
tends to fill itself with emphases, and these
salient parts become identified and fixed and
abstracted; so that experience now flows as if
shot through with adjectives and nouns and
prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is
only a relative term, meaning the propor
tional amount of unverbalized sensation which
it still embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole
and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and
separated. The great continua of time, space,
and the self envelope everything, betwixt
them, and flow together without interfering.
The things that they envelope come as separate
in some ways and as continuous in others.
Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and
others are irreconcilable. Qualities compen-

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

etrate one space, or exclude each other from it.
They cling together persistently in groups that
move as units, or else they separate. Their
changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their
kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so,
they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discon
tinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of
immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as
primordial elements of 'fact' as are the dis
tinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by
which I feel that this passing minute is a new
pulse of my life, I feel that the old life con
tinues into it, and the feeling of continuance in
no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a
novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoni
ously. Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions,
'is,' 'is n't,' 'then/ 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside/
'between,' 'next/ 'like/ 'unlike/ 'as/ 'but/
flower out of the stream of pure experience, the
stream of concretes or the sensational stream,
as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and
they melt into it again as fluidly when we
apply them to a new portion of the stream.

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

If now we ask why we must thus translate
experience from a more concrete or pure into a
more intellectualized form, filling it with ever
more abounding conceptual distinctions, ra
tionalism and naturalism give different replies.

The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic
life is absolute and its interests imperative;
that to understand is simply the duty of man;
and that who questions this need not be argued
with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away
his case.

The naturalist answer is that the environ
ment kills as well as sustains us, and that the
tendency of raw experience to extinguish the
experient himself is lessened just in the degree
in which the elements in it that have a practi
cal bearing upon life are analyzed out of the
continuum and verbally fixed and coupled to
gether, so that we may know what is in the
wind for us and get ready to react in time.
Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been
always perfectly healthy, there would never

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

have arisen the necessity of isolating or ver
balizing any of its terms. We should just have
experienced inarticulately and unintellectually
enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the
naturalist account implies that, whenever we
intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we
ought to do so for the sake of redescending
to the purer or more concrete level again;
and that if an intellect stays aloft among its
abstract terms and generalized relations, and
does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into
some particular point of the immediate stream
of life, it fails to finish out its function and
leaves its normal race unrun.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that
naturalism gives a true enough account of the
way in which our intellect arose at first, but
they will deny these latter implications. The
case, they will say, resembles that of sexual
love. Originating in the animal need of getting
another generation born, this passion has de
veloped secondarily such imperious spiritual
needs that, if you ask why another generation
ought to be born at all, the answer is: 'Chiefly

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

that love may go on.' Just so with our intel
lect: it originated as a practical means of serv
ing life; but it has developed incidentally the
function of understanding absolute truth; and
life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a
means by which that function may be prose
cuted. But truth and the understanding of it
lie among the abstracts and universals, so the
intellect now carries on its higher business
wholly in this region, without any need of
redescending into pure experience again.

If the contrasted tendencies which I thus
designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are
not recognized by the reader, perhaps an ex
ample will make them more concrete. Mr.
Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalist.
He admits that our intellect is primarily prac
tical, but says that, for philosophers, the prac
tical need is simply Truth. Truth, moreover,
must be assumed ' consistent.' Immediate ex
perience has to be broken into subjects and
qualities, terms and relations, to be understood
as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less
consistent then ever. Taken raw, it is all un-

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

distinguished. Intellectualized, it is all dis
tinction without oneness. 'Such an arrange
ment may work, but the theoretic problem is
not solved. ' The question is ' how the diversity
can exist in harmony with the oneness.' To go
back to pure experience is unavailing. 'Mere
feeling gives no answer to our riddle.' Even if
your intuition is a fact, it is not an understand
ing. 'It is a mere experience, and furnishes
no consistent view.' The experience offered as
facts or truths 'I find that my intellect rejects
because they contradict themselves. They
offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a
way which it feels is not its way and which it
can not repeat as its own. . . . For to be satis
fied, my intellect must understand, and it can
not understand by taking a congeries in the
lump.' * So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests
of 'understanding' (as he conceives that func
tion), turns his back on finite experience for
ever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction,
the direction of the Absolute; and this kind of

1 [F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp.
152-153, 23, 118, 104, 108-109, 570.]

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now
call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon
opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual
products are most true which, turning their
face towards the Absolute, come nearest to
symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and
the one. For the other, those are most true
which most successfully dip back into the
finite stream of feeling and grow most easily
confluent with some particular wave or wave
let. Such confluence not only proves the in
tellectual operation to have been true (as an
addition may ' prove' that a subtraction is
already rightly performed), but it constitutes,
according to pragmatism, all that we mean by
calling it true. Only in so far as they lead us,
successfully or unsuccessfully, back into sen
sible experience again, are our abstracts and
universals true or false at all.1

Ill

In Section VI of [the last essay], I adopted

1 Compare Professor MacLennan's admirable Auseinandersetzung
with Mr. Bradley, in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. I, [1904], pp. 403 ff., especially pp. 405-407.

100

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

in a general way the common-sense belief that
one and the same world is cognized by our
different minds; but I left undiscussed the
dialectical arguments which maintain that
this is logically absurd. The usual reason
given for its being absurd is that it assumes
one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two
relations at once; to my mind, namely, and
again to yours; whereas a term taken in a
second relation can not logically be the same
term which it was at first.

I have heard this reason urged so often in
discussing with absolutists, and it would de
stroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it
were valid, that I am bound to give it an atten
tive ear, and seriously to search its strength.

For instance, let the matter in dispute be
term If, asserted to be on the one hand related
to L9 and on the other to N; and let the two
cases of relation be symbolized by L — M and
M — N respectively. When, now, I assume
that the experience may immediately come
and be given in the shape L — M — N, with
no trace of doubling or internal fission in the

101

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

M, I am told that this is all a popular delusion;
that L — M — N logically means two differ
ent experiences, L — M and M — N, namely;
and that although the Absolute may, and in
deed must, from its superior point of view,
read its own kind of unity into M 's two edi
tions, yet as elements in finite experience the
two M's lie irretrievably asunder, and the
world between them is broken and unbridged.
In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must
avoid slipping from the logical into the physi
cal point of view. It would be easy, in taking
a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to
choose one in which the letter M should stand
for a collective noun of some sort, which noun,
being related to L by one of its parts and to
N by another, would inwardly be two things
when it stood outwardly in both relations.
Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who
weighed so many stone by his body, influences
posterity by his doctrine.' The body and the
doctrine are two things, between which our
finite minds can discover no real sameness,
though the same name covers both of them.

102

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

And then, one might continue: 'Only an Abso
lute is capable of uniting such a non-identity.'
We must, I say, avoid this sort of example, for
the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply
to terms and relations universally. It must be
true of abstract units as well as of nouns col
lective; and if we prove it by concrete examples
we must take the simplest, so as to avoid
irrelevant material suggestions.

Taken thus in all its generality, the abso
lutist contention seems to use as its major
premise Hume's notion 'that all our distinct
perceptions are distinct existences, and that
the mind never perceives any real connexion
among distinct existences.' 1 Undoubtedly,
since we use two phrases in talking first about
* M* s relation to L' and then about 'M's rela
tion to N, ' we must be having, or must have
had, two distinct perceptions; — and the rest
would then seem to follow duly. But the start
ing-point of the reasoning here seems to be the
fact of the two phrases; and this suggests that

1 [Hume: Treatise of Human Nature, Appendix, Selby-Bigge's
edition, p. 636.]

103

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be
that the whole dialectic consists in attributing
to the experience talked-about a constitution
similar to that of the language in which we de
scribe it? Must we assert the objective double-
ness of the M merely because we have to name
it twice over when we name its two relations ?
Candidly, I can think of no other reason
than this for the dialectic conclusion; l for, if
we think, not of our words, but of any simple
concrete matter which they may be held to
signify, the experience itself belies the paradox
asserted. We use indeed two separate concepts
in analyzing our object, but we know them all
the while to be but substitutional, and that the
M in L — M and the M in M — N mean ( i. e.>
are capable of leading to and terminating in)
one self -same piece, My of sensible experience.
This persistent identity of certain units (or
emphases, or points, or objects, or members —
call them what you will) of the experience-
continuum, is just one of those conjunctive

1 Technically, it seems classable as a 'fallacy of composition.' A
duality, predicable of the two wholes, L — M and M — N, is
forthwith predicated of one of their parts, M.

104>

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

features of it, on which I am obliged to insist
so emphatically.1 For samenesses are parts of
experience's indefeasible structure. When I
hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after
image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that
same bell-stroke.' When I see a thing M , with
L to the left of it and N to the right of it, I see
it as one M; and if you tell me I have had
to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a
thousand times I should still see it as a unit.2
Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multipli
city of my successive takings is aboriginal. It
comes unbroken as that M, as a singular which
I encounter; they come broken, as those tak
ings, as my plurality of operations. The unity
and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I
do not easily fathom why my opponents should
find the separateness so much more easily un
derstandable that they must needs infect the
whole of finite experience with it, and relegate

1 See above, pp. 42 ff.

2 I may perhaps refer here to my Principles of Psychology, vol. I,
pp. 459 ff. It really seems 'weird' to have to argue (as I am forced
now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two
surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on
the table while I write — the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so
brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!

105

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and
no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to
the region of the Absolute's mysteries. I do
not easily fathom this, I say, for the said oppo
nents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all
that I can catch in their talk is the substitu
tion of what is true of certain words for what is
true of what they signify. They stay with the
words, — not returning to the stream of life
whence all the meaning of them came, and
which is always ready to reabsorb them.

For aught this argument proves, then, we
may continue to believe that one thing can be
known by many knowers. But the denial of
one thing in many relations is but one applica
tion of a still profounder dialectic difficulty.
Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is
man and good is good; and Hegel 1 and Herbart
in their day, more recently A. Spir,2 and most

1 [For the author's criticism of Hegel's view of relations, cf.
Will to Believe, pp. 278-279. ED.]

2 [Cf. A. Spir: Denken und Wirklichkeit, part I, bk. in, ch. IV
(containing also account of Herbart). ED.]

106

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley,
informs us that a term can logically only be ,
a punctiform unit, and that not one of the
conjunctive relations between things, which
experience seems to yield, is rationally pos
sible.

Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiri
cism without even a shilling. Radical empiri
cism takes conjunctive relations at their face
value, holding them to be as real as the terms
united by them.1 The world it represents as a
collection, some parts of which are conjunc
tively and others disjunctively related. Two
parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless
hang together by intermediaries with which
they are severally connected, and the whole
world eventually may hang together similarly,
inasmuch as some path of conjunctive transi
tion by which to pass from one of its parts
to another may always be discernible. Such
determinately various hanging-together may
be called concatenated union, to distinguish it
from the ' through-and-through ' type of union,

1 [See above, pp. 42, 49.]
107

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

'each in all and all in each' (union of total
conflux, as one might call it), which monistic
systems hold to obtain when things are taken
in their absolute reality. In a concatenated
world a partial conflux often is experienced.
Our concepts and our sensations are confluent;
successive states of the same ego, and feelings
of the same body are confluent. Where the
experience is not of conflux, it may be of
conterminousness (things with but one thing
between); or of contiguousness (nothing be
tween); or of likeness; or of nearness; or of
simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness;
or of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of
mere and-ness, which last relation would make
of however disjointed a world otherwise, at any
rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse.'
r Now Mr. Bradley tells us that none of these
relations, as we actually experience them, can
possibly be real.1 My next duty, accordingly,

1 Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into
phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we attribute a certain
relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex,
have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train,
and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put
motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the

108

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

must be to rescue radical empiricism from Mr.
Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his
general contention, that the very notion of re
lation is unthinkable clearly, has been success
fully met by many critics.1

It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice
both to readers and to the previous writers, to
repeat good arguments already printed. So, in
noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to
the interests of radical empiricism solely.

The first duty of radical empiricism, taking
given conjunctions at their face-value, is to
class some of them as more intimate and some
as more external. When 'two terms are simi
lar, their very natures enter into the relation.

motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like
this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and
that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, rela
tions are impossible of comprehension.

1 Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his Man and
the Cosmos; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapter xn ("The Validity of
Judgment ") of his Theory of Knowledge; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in his
Humanism, essay xi. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hod-
der's, in the Psychological Review, vol. i, [1894], p. 307; Stout's in the
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-2, p. 1; and MacLennan's
in [The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,
vol. i, 1904, p. 403].

109

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Being what they are, no matter where or when,
the likeness never can be denied, if asserted.
It continues predicable as long as the terms
continue. Other relations, the where and the
when, for example, seem adventitious. The
sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on' the table,
for example; and in either case the relation \
involves only the outside of its terms. Having
an outside, both of them, they contribute by it
to the relation. It is external: the term's inner
nature is irrelevant to it. Any book, any table,
may fall into the relation, which is created pro
hac vice, not by their existence, but by their
casual situation. It is just because so many of
the conjunctions of experience seem so external
that a philosophy of pure experience must tend
to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things
have space-relations, for example, we are free
to imagine them with different origins even. If
they could get to be, and get into space at all,
then they may have done so separately. Once
there, however, they are additives to one an
other, and, with no prejudice to their natures,

all sorts of space-relations may supervene be-

110

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

tween them. The question of how things could
come to be anyhow, is wholly different from
the question what their relations, once the
being accomplished, may consist in.

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external
relations as the space-relations which we here
talk of must hold of entirely different subjects
from those of which the absence of such rela
tions might a moment previously have been
plausibly asserted. Not only is the situation
different when the book is on the table, but
the book itself is different as a book, from what
it was when it was off the table.1 He admits
that "such external relations seem possible
„ and even existing. . . . That you do not alter
what you compare or rearrange in space seems
to common sense quite obvious, and that on

1 Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations. Of
course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight
enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But
such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is
whether the successive relations 'on* and 'not-on' can rationally (not
physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Pro
fessor A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations
when he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, 'as contra
distinguished from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way
affected' (Elements of Metaphysics, p. 145). Note the substitution,
for ' related ' of the word ' affected,' which begs the whole question. .

Ill

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the other side there are as obvious difficulties
does not occur to common sense at all. And I
will begin by pointing out these difficulties. ...
There is a relation in the result, and this rela
tion, we hear, is to make no difference in its
terms. But, if so, to what does it make a dif
ference? [Does n't it make a difference to us on
lookers, at least ?] and what is the meaning and
sense of qualifying the terms by it? [Surely the
meaning is to tell the truth about their relative
position.1] If,in short, it is external to theterms, v
how can it possibly be true of them? [7s it the
'intimacy* suggested by the little word* of,' here,
which I have underscored, that is the root of Mr.
Bradley' s trouble?] . . . If the terms from their
inner nature do not enter into the relation, v
then, so far as they are concerned, they seem
related for no reason at all. . . . Things are spa
tially related, first in one way, and then be
come related in another way, and yet in no
way themselves are altered; for the relations,
it is said, are but external. But I reply that, if

1 But "is there any sense," asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579,
"and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and 'about*
things? " Surely such a question may be left unanswered.

112

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

so, I can not understand the leaving by the
terms of one set of relations and their adop
tion of another fresh set. The process and its
result to the terms, if they contribute nothing
to it [Surely they contribute to it all there is
'of it !] seem irrational throughout. [// * irra
tional ' here means simply 'non-rational,' or non-
deduciblefrom the essence of either term singly, it
is no reproach; if it means 'contradicting9 such
essence, Mr. Bradley should show wherein and
how.} But, if they contribute any thing, . they
must surely be affected internally. [Why so,
if they contribute only their surface ? In such
relations as 'on,' 'afoot away,9 'between,' 'next9
etc., only surfaces are in question.] ... If the
terms contribute anything whatever, then the
terms are affected [inwardly altered?] by the
arrangement. . . . That for working purposes
we treat, and do well to treat, some relations
as external merely I do not deny, and that of
course is not the question at issue here. That
question is ... whether in the end and in
principle a mere external relation [i. e., a rela
tion which can change without forcing its terms

113

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

to change their nature simultaneously] is possi
ble and forced on us by the facts." 1

Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies
of space, which, according to him, prove it to
be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a
medium of external relations; and he then con
cludes that "Irrationality and externality can
not be the last truth about things. Somewhere
there must be a reason why this and that ap-
pear together. And this reason and reality
must reside in the whole from which terms and
relations are abstractions, a whole in which
their internal connection must lie, and out of
which from the background appear those fresh
results which never could have come from
the premises." And he adds that "Where the
whole is different, the terms that qualify and
contribute to it must so far be different. . . .
They are altered so far only [How far ? farther
than externally, yet not through and through ?]
but still they are altered. ... I must insist
that in each case the terms are qualified by
their whole [Qualified how ? — Do their external

* Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 575-576.
114

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

relations, situations , dates, etc., changed as these
are in the new whole, fail to qualify them 'far9
enough ?], and that in the second case there is a
whole which differs both logically and psycho
logically from the first whole; and I urge that
in contributing to the change the terms so far
are altered."

Not merely the relations, then, but the terms
are altered: und zwar 'so far.' But just how
far is the whole problem; and 'through-and-
through' would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's
somewhat undecided utterances 1 ) to be the

1 I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' which sounds
terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which
Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he
says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged,
though, hi its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what he
says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C,
in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be
altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out
of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no
change' (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist
to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio
elenchi ? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire elenchus
and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from
existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing
their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into new
gestaltqualitaten, then it follows that the same elements are logically
able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend
on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and
through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism
is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe

115

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

full Bradleyan answer. The * whole' which he
here treats as primary and determinative of
each part's manner of ' contributing,' simply
musty when it alters, alter in its entirety. There
must be total conflux of its parts, each into
and through each other. The 'must' appears
here as a Machtspruch, as an ipse dixit of Mr.
Bradley 's absolutistically tempered 'under
standing,' for he candidly confesses that how
the parts do differ as they contribute to differ
ent wholes, is unknown to him.1

Although I have every wish to comprehend
the authority by which Mr. Bradley's under
standing speaks, his words leave me wholly
unconverted. 'External relations' stand with
their withers all unwrung, and remain, for
aught he proves to the contrary, not only
practically workable, but also perfectly intelli
gible factors of reality.

is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical
empiricism, in short, follow.
1 Op. cit.3 pp. 577-579.

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THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the
most extraordinary power of perceiving sepa
rations and the most extraordinary impotence
in comprehending conjunctions. One would
naturally say "neither or both,' but not so Mr.
Bradley. When a common man analyzes cer
tain whats from out the stream of experience, he
understands their distinctness as thus isolated.
But this does not prevent him from equally
well understanding their combination with
each other as originally experienced in the con
crete, or their confluence with new sensible ex
periences in which they recur as 'the same.'
Returning into the stream of sensible present
ation, nouns and adjectives, and thats and ab
stract whats, grow confluent again, and the
word 'is' names all these experiences of con
junction. Mr. Bradley understands the isola
tion of the abstracts, but to understand the
combination is to him impossible.1 "To under-

1 So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this : ' Book/
'table,' 'on' — how does the existence of these three abstract elements
result in this book being livingly on this table. Why is n't the table on

117

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

stand a complex AB," he says, "I must begin
with A or B. And beginning, say with A, if I
then merely find B9 I have either lost A, or
I have got beside A, [the word 'beside9 seems
here vital, as meaning a conjunction 'external*
and therefore unintelligible] something else, and
in neither case have I understood.1 For my
intellect can not simply unite a diversity, nor
has it in itself any form or way of together
ness, and you gain nothing if, beside A and 5,
you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to
my intellect that is no more than another ex
ternal element. And ' facts/ once for all, are
for my intellect not true unless they satisfy
it. ... The intellect has in its nature no
principle of mere togetherness." 2

the book? Or why does n't the 'on* connect itself with another book,
or something that is not a table? Must n't something in each of the
three elements already determine the two others to it, so that they do
not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Must n't the whole fact be pre
figured in each part, and exist dejure before it can exist de facto ? But,
if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual
miniature of the whole fact's constitution actuating every partial
factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical
fallacy of looking behind a fact in ease for the ground of the fact, and
finding it in the shape of the very same fact in posse? Somewhere we
must leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing.

1 Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W. J.

2 Op. cit., pp. 570, 572.

118

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define
* intellect5 as the power by which we perceive
separations but not unions — provided he
give due notice to the reader. But why then
claim that such a maimed and amputated
power must reign supreme in philosophy, and
accuse on its behoof the whole empirical
world of irrationality? It is true that he else
where attributes to the intellect a propritu
motus of transition, but says that when he
looks for these transitions in the detail of liv
ing experience, he "is unable to verify such a
solution.' l

Yet he never explains what the intellectual
transitions would be like in case we had them.
He only defines them negatively — they are
not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal;
or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any
way relational as we naively trace relations,
for relations separate terms, and need them
selves to be hooked on ad infinitum. The near
est approach he makes to describing a truly
intellectual transition is where he speaks of

1 Op. cii.t pp. 568, 569.
119

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

A and B as being ' united, each from its own
nature, in a whole which is the nature of both
alike.' l But this (which, pace Mr. Bradley,
seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking' a con
geries in a 'lump,' if not to 'swamping') sug
gests nothing but that conflux which pure
experience so abundantly offers, as when
'space,' 'white' and 'sweet' are confluent in
a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and
optical sensations confluent in 'my hand/2
All that I can verify in the transitions which
Mr. Bradley 's intellect desiderates as its pro-
prius motus is a reminiscence of these and
other sensible conjunctions (especially space-
conjunctions), but a reminiscence so vague
that its originals are not recognized. Bradley
in short repeats the fable of the dog, the bone,
and its image in the water. With a world of
particulars, given in loveliest union, in con
junction definitely various, and variously de-

1 Op. cit., p. 570.

2 How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in
'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an additional
entity between the terms, needing itself to be related again to each!
Both Bradley (op. cit., pp. 32-33) and Royce (The World and the
Iiidividual, vol. I, p. 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.

120

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS

finite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as
soon as you see the fact of them,1 for there is
no 'how' except the constitution of the fact
as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure
experience, he asks for some ineffable union in
the abstract instead, which, if he gained it,
would only be a duplicate of what he has al
ready in his full possession. Surely he abuses
the privilege which society grants to all us
philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with
absolutism in possession in so many quarters,
omission to defend my radical empiricism
against its best known champion would count
as either superficiality or inability. I have to
conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated
in the least degree the usual conjunctions by
which the world, as experienced, hangs so va
riously together. In particular it leaves an em
pirical theory of knowledge 2 intact, and lets
us continue to believe with common sense that

1 The 'why' and the 'whence* are entirely other questions, not
under discussion, &a I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience
gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the
puzzle.
/» kbove, p. 52.

121

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

one object may be known, if we have any
ground for thinking that it is known, to many
knowers.

In [the next essay] I shall return to this last
supposition, which seems to me to offer other
difficulties much harder for a philosophy of
pure experience to deal with than any of
absolutism's dialectic objections.

HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW
ONE THING1

IN [the essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness
Exist? ' I have tried to show that when we call
an experience 'conscious,' that does not mean
that it is suffused throughout with a peculiar
modality of being ('psychic' being) as stained
glass may be suffused with light, but rather
that it stands in certain determinate relations
to other portions of experience extraneous to
itself. These form one peculiar 'context' for
it; while, taken in another context of experi
ences, we class it as a fact in the physical
world. This 'pen,' for example, is, in the first
instance, a bald that, a datum, fact, phenom
enon, content, or whatever other neutral or
ambiguous name you may prefer to apply. I
called it in that article a 'pure experience.' To
get classed either as a physical pen or as some
one's percept of a pen, it must assume a func-

1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. 11, No. 7, March 30, 1905.]

123

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

tion, and that can only happen in a more com
plicated world. So far as in that world it is
a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and
obeys the guidance of a hand, it is a physical
pen. That is what we mean by being ' physi
cal,' in a pen. So far as it is instable, on the
contrary, coming and going with the move
ments of my eyes, altering with what I call my
fancy, continuous with subsequent experiences
of its 'having been' (in the past tense), it is the
percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiar
ities are what we mean by being ' conscious,'
in a pen.

In Section VI of another [essay]1 1 tried to
show that the same that, the same numerically
identical pen of pure experience, can enter
simultaneously into many conscious contexts,
or, in other words, be an object for many differ
ent minds. I admitted that I had not space
to treat of certain possible objections in that
article; but in [the last essay] I took some of
the objections up. At the end of that [essay]
I said that still more formidable-sounding

1 "A World of Pure Experience," above, pp. 39-91.
124

TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING

objections remained; so, to leave my pure-
experience theory in as strong a state as pos
sible, I propose to consider those objections now.

The objections I previously tried to dispose
of were purely logical or dialectical. No one
identical term, whether physical or psychical,
it had been said, could be the subject of two
relations at once. This thesis I sought to prove
unfounded. The objections that now confront
us arise from the nature supposed to inhere in
psychic facts specifically. Whatever may be
the case with physical objects, a fact of con
sciousness, it is alleged (and indeed very plau
sibly), can not, without self-contradiction, be
treated as a portion of two different minds,,
and for the following reasons.

In the physical world we make with impu
nity the assumption that one and the same
material object can figure in an indefinitely
large number of different processes at once.
When, for instance, a sheet of rubber is pulled
at its four corners, a unit of rubber in the mid
dle of the sheet is affected by all four of the

125

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

pulls. It transmits them each, as if it pulled in
four different ways at once itself. So, an air-
particle or an ether-particle * compounds' the
different directions of movement imprinted on
it without obliterating their several individuali
ties. It delivers them distinct, on the contrary,
at as many several 'receivers' (ear, eye or what
not) as may be 'tuned' to that effect. The ap
parent paradox of a distinctness like this sur
viving in the midst of compounding is a thing
which, I fancy, the analyses made by physi
cists have by this time sufficiently cleared up.

But if, on the strength of these analogies, one
should ask: "Why, if two or more lines can run
through one and the same geometrical point,
or if two or more distinct processes of activ
ity can run through one and the same physi
cal thing so that it simultaneously plays a role
in each and every process, might not two or
more streams of personal consciousness include
one and the same unit of experience so that it
would simultaneously be a part of the experi
ence of all the different minds?" one would be
checked by thinking of a certain peculiarity by

126

TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING

which phenomena of consciousness differ from
physical things.

While physical things, namely, are supposed
to be permanent and to have their * states,' a
fact of consciousness exists but once and is a
state. Its esse is sentiri; it is only so far as it is
felt; and it is unambiguously and unequivo
cally exactly what is felt. The hypothesis under
consideration would, however, oblige it to be
felt equivocally, felt now as part of my mind
and again at the same time not as a part of my
mind, but of yours (for my mind is not yours),
and this would seem impossible without doub
ling it into two distinct things, or, in other
words, without reverting to the ordinary dual-
istic philosophy of insulated minds each know
ing its object representatively as a third thing,
— and that would be to give up the pure-
experience scheme altogether.

Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of
pure experience might enter into and figure in
two diverse streams of consciousness without
turning itself into the two units which, on our
hypothesis, it must not be ?

127

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

There is a way; and the first step towards it
is to see more precisely how the unit enters into
either one of the streams of consciousness
alone. Just what, from being * pure/ does its
becoming ' conscious' once mean?

It means, first, that new experiences have
supervened; and, second, that they have
borne a certain assignable relation to the unit
supposed. Continue, if you please, to speak of
the pure unit as 'the pen.' So far as the pen's
successors do but repeat the pen or, being
different from it, are * energetically' 1 related
to it, it and they will form a group of stably
existing physical things. So far, however, as
its successors differ from it in another well-
determined way, the pen will figure in their
context, not as a physical, but as a mental fact.
It will become a passing 'percept,' my percept
of that pen. What now is that decisive well-
determined way?

In the chapter on * The Self,' in my Principles

1 [For an explanation of this expression, see above, p. 32.]
128

TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING

of Psychology, I explained the continuous iden
tity of each personal consciousness as a name
for the practical fact that new experiences 1
come which look back on the old ones, find
them 'warm/ and greet and appropriate them
as 'mine/ These operations mean, when ana
lyzed empirically, several tolerably definite
things, viz. :

1. That the new experience has past time for
its 'content,' and in that time a pen that 'was';

2. That 'warmth' was also about the pen,
in the sense of a group of feelings ('interest'
aroused, 'attention' turned, 'eyes' employed,
etc.) that were closely connected with it and
that now recur and evermore recur with un
broken vividness, though from the pen of now,
which may be only an image, all such vividness
may have gone;

3. That these feelings are the nucleus of ' me ' ;

4. That whatever once was associated with
them was, at least for that one moment,
'mine' — my implement if associated with

1 I call them 'passing thoughts ' in the book — the passage in point
goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol. I.

129

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

hand-feelings, my ' percept' only, if only eye-
feelings and attention-feelings were involved.

The pen, realized in this retrospective way
as my percept, thus figures as a fact of 'con
scious' life. But it does so only so far as 'ap
propriation' has occurred; and appropriation
is part of the content of a later experience wholly
additional to the originally 'pure' pen. That
pen, virtually both objective and subjective, is
at its own moment actually and intrinsically
neither. It has to be looked back upon and
used, in order to be classed in either distinctive
way. But its use, so called, is in the hands of
the other experience, while it stands, through
out the operation, passive and unchanged.

If this pass muster as an intelligible account
of how an experience originally pure can enter
into one consciousness, the next question is as
to how it might conceivably enter into two.

Ill

Obviously no new kind of condition would
have to be supplied. All that we should have
to postulate would be a second subsequent

130

TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING

experience, collateral and contemporary with
the first subsequent one, in which a similar act
of appropriation should occur. The two acts
would interfere neither with one another nor
with the originally pure pen. It would sleep
undisturbed in its own past, no matter how
many such successors^ went through their sev
eral appropriative acts. Each would know it
as 'my' percept, each would class it as a 'con
scious' fact.

Nor need their so classing it interfere in the
least with their classing it at the same time as
a physical pen. Since the classing in both cases
depends upon the taking of it in one group or
another of associates, if the superseding experi
ence were of wide enough ' span ' it could think
the pen in both groups simultaneously, and yet
distinguish the two groups. It would then see
the whole situation conformably to what we
call 'the representative theory of cognition,'
and that is what we all spontaneously do. As a
man philosophizing 'popularly,' I believe that
what I see myself writing with is double — I
think it in its relations to physical nature, and

131

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

also in its relations to my personal life; I see
that it is in my mind, but that it also is a
physical pen.

The paradox of the same experience figuring
in two consciousnesses seems thus no paradox
at all. To be 'conscious' means not simply to
be, but to be reported, known, to have aware
ness of one's being added to that being; and
this is just what happens when the appropri-
ative experience supervenes. The pen-experi
ence in its original immediacy is not aware of
itself, it simply is, and the second experience is
required for what we call awareness of it to
occur.1 The difficulty of understanding what
happens here is, therefore, not a logical diffi
culty: there is no contradiction involved. It is
an ontological difficulty rather. Experiences
come on an enormous scale, and if we take

1 Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the
minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the
second retrospects the first. (Cf. the section 'Analysis of Minima* in
his Philosophy of Reflection, vol. i, p. 248; also the chapter entitled
'The Moment of Experience' in his Metaphysic of Experience, vol. I,
p. 34.) 'We live forward, but we understand backward' is a phrase of
Kierkegaard's which Hoff ding quotes. [ H. Hoffding : " A Philosophi
cal Confession," Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods, vol. n, 1905, p. 86.]

132

TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING

them all together, they come in a chaos of
incommensurable relations that we can not
straighten out. We have to abstract different
groups of them, and handle these separately
if we are to talk of them at all. But how the
experiences ever get themselves made, or why
their characters and relations are just such
as appear, we can not begin to understand.
Granting, however, that, by hook or crook,
they can get themselves made, and can appear
in the successions that I have so schematically
described, then we have to confess that even
although (as I began by quoting from the ad
versary) 'a feeling only is as it is felt,' there is
still nothing absurd in the notion of its being
felt in two different ways at once, as yours,
namely, and as mine. It is, indeed, 'mine' only
as it is felt as mine, and 'yours' only as it is
felt as yours. But it is felt as neither by itself,
but only when 'owned' by our two several re
membering experiences, just as one undivided
estate is owned by several heirs.

133

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

One word, now, before I close, about the
corollaries of the views set forth. Since the
acquisition of conscious quality on the part of
an experience depends upon a context coming
to it, it follows that the sum total of all experi
ences, having no context, can not strictly be
called conscious at all. It is a that, an Ab
solute, a 'pure' experience on an enormous
scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable
into thought and thing. This the post-Kant
ian idealists have always practically acknow
ledged by calling their doctrine 'an Identitats-
philosophie. The question of the Beseelung of
the All of things ought not, then, even to be
asked. No more ought the question of its truth
to be asked, for truth is a relation inside of the
sum total, obtaining between thoughts and
something else, and thoughts, as we have seen,
can only be contextual things. In these re
spects the pure experiences of our philosophy
are, in themselves considered, so many little
absolutes, the philosophy of pure experience

134

TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING

being only a more comminuted Identitatsphi-
losophie.1

Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postu
lated with any amount whatever of span or
field. If it exert the retrospective and appro-
priative function on any other piece of experi
ence, the latter thereby enters into its own
conscious stream. And in this operation time
intervals make no essential difference. After
sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect as it is
between two successive waking moments of my
time. Accordingly if, millions of years later, a
similarly retrospective experience should any
how come to birth, my present thought would
form a genuine portion of its long-span con
scious life. 'Form a portion,' I say, but not in
the sense that the two things could be enti-
tatively or substantively one — they cannot,
for they are numerically discrete facts — but
only in the sense that the functions of my pre
sent thought, its knowledge, its purpose, its
content and 'consciousness/ in short, being
inherited, would be continued practically

1 [Cf. below, pp. 197, 202.J
135

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

unchanged. Speculations like Fechner's, of an
Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness
enveloping narrower ones throughout the cos
mos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in
order, provided they distinguish the functional
from the entitative point of view, and do not
treat the minor consciousness under discussion
as a kind of standing material of which the
wider ones consist.1

1 [Cf . A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. iv, ' Concerning Fechner,' and
Lect, v, 'The Compounding of Consciousness.']

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL

FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE

EXPERIENCE1

COMMON sense and popular philosophy are as
dualistic as it is possible to be. Thoughts, we
all naturally think, are made of one kind of
substance, and things of another. Conscious
ness, flowing inside of us in the forms of con
ception or judgment, or concentrating itself in
the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly
felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and
known in contrast with the space-filling ob
jective 'content' which it envelopes and ac
companies. In opposition to this dualistic
philosophy, I tried, in [the first essay] to show
that thoughts and things are absolutely homo
geneous as to their material, and that their
opposition is only one of relation and of func
tion. There is no thought-stuff different from
thing-stuff, I said; but the same identical piece

1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. n, No. 11, May 25, 1905.J

137

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

of 'pure experience' (which was the name 1
gave to the materia prima of everything) can
stand alternately for a 'fact of consciousness'
or for a physical reality, according as it is taken
in one context or in another. For the right
understanding of what follows, I shall have to
presuppose that the reader will have read that
[essay].1

The commonest objection which the doc
trine there laid down runs up against is drawn
from the existence of our 'affections/ In our
pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and
angers, in the beauty, comicality, importance
or preciousness of certain objects and situa
tions, we have, I am told by many critics, a
great realm of experience intuitively recog
nized as spiritual, made, and felt to be made,
of consciousness exclusively, and different in
nature from the space-filling kind of being
which is enjoyed by physical objects. In
Section VII. of [the first essay], I treated of
this class of experiences very inadequately,

1 It will be still better if he shall have also read the [essay] entitled
'A World of Pure Experience/ which follows [the first] and develops
its ideas still farther.

138

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

because I had to be so brief. I now return to
the subject, because I believe that, so far from
invalidating my general thesis, these phenom
ena, when properly analyzed, afford it powerful
support.

The central point of the pure-experience the
ory is that 'outer' and 'inner' are names for
two groups into which we sort experiences
according to the way in which they act upon
their neighbors. Any one 'content/ such as
hard, let us say, can be assigned to either
group. In the outer group it is 'strong,' it acts
'energetically' and aggressively. Here what
ever is hard interferes with the space its neigh
bors occupy. It dents them; is impenetrable
by them; and we call the hardness then a phy
sical hardness. In the mind, on the contrary,
the hard thing is nowhere in particular, it
dents nothing, it suffuses through its mental
neighbors, as it were, and interpenetrates
them. Taken in this group we call both it and
them 'ideas' or 'sensations'; and the basis of
the two groups respectively is the different
type of interrelation, the mutual impenetrabil-

139

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ity, on the one hand, and the lack of physical
interference and interaction, oh the other.

That what in itself is one and the same
entity should be able to function thus differ
ently in different contexts is a natural conse
quence of the extremely complex reticulations
in which our experiences come. To her off
spring a tigress is tender, but cruel to every
other living thing — both cruel and tender,
therefore, at once. A mass in movement resists
every force that operates contrariwise to its
own direction, but to forces that pursue the
same direction, or come in at right angles, it is
absolutely inert. It is thus both energetic and
inert; and the same is true (if you vary the
associates properly) of every other piece of
experience. It is only towards certain specific
groups of associates that the physical energies,
as we call them, of a content are put forth. In
another group it may be quite inert.

It is possible to imagine a universe of expe
riences in which the only alternative between
neighbors would be either physical interaction
or complete inertness. In such a world the

140

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

mental or the physical status of any piece of
experience would be unequivocal. When act
ive, it would figure in the physical, and when
inactive, in the mental group.

But the universe we live in is more chaotic
than this, and there is room in it for the hybrid
or ambiguous group of our affectional experi
ences, of our emotions and appreciative per
ceptions. In the paragraphs that follow I shall
try to show:

(1) That the popular notion that these ex
periences are intuitively given as purely inner
facts is hasty and erroneous; and

(2) That their ambiguity illustrates beauti
fully my central thesis that subjectivity and
objectivity are affairs not of what an experi
ence is aboriginally made of, but of its classi
fication. Classifications depend on our tem
porary purposes. For certain purposes it is
convenient to take things in one set of rela
tions, for other purposes in another set. In the
two cases their contexts are apt to be different.
In the case of our affectional experiences we

have no permanent and steadfast purpose that

141

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

obliges us to be consistent, so we find it easy to
let them float ambiguously, sometimes class
ing them with our feelings, sometimes with
more physical realities, according to caprice
or to the convenience of the moment. Thus
would these experiences, so far from being
, an obstacle to the pure experience philoso
phy, serve as an excellent corroboration of its
truth.

First of all, then, it is a mistake to say, with
the objectors whom I began by citing, that
anger, love and fear are affections purely of the

mind. That, to a great extent at any rate, they
%

are simultaneously affections of the body is
proved by the whole literature of the James-
Lange theory of emotion.1 All our pains,
moreover, are local, and we are always free to
speak of them in objective as well as in sub
jective terms. We can say that we are aware of
a painful place, filling a certain bigness in our
organism, or we can say that we are inwardly
in a 'state5 of pain. All our adjectives of

1 [Cf. The Principles of Psychology, vol. n, ch. xxv; and "The
Physical Basis of Emotion," The Psychological Review, vol. i, 1894,
p. 516.]

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

worth are similarly ambiguous — I instanced
some of the ambiguities [in the first essay].1
Is the preciousness of a diamond a quality of
the gem? or is it a feeling in our mind? Practi
cally we treat it as both or as either, accord
ing to the temporary direction of our thought.
'Beauty,' says Professor Santayana, 'is pleas
ure objectified'; and in Sections 10 and 11 of
his work, The Sense of Beauty, he treats in a
masterly way of this equivocal realm. The
various pleasures we receive from an object
may count as * feelings' when we take them
singly, but when they combine in a total rich
ness, we call the result the 'beauty' of the
object, and treat it as an outer attribute which
our mind perceives. We discover beauty just as
we discover the physical properties of things.
Training is needed to make us expert in either
line. Single sensations also may be ambiguous.
Shall we say an ( agreeable degree of heat,' or
an 'agreeable feeling' occasioned by the degree
of heat? Either will do; and language would
lose most of its esthetic and rhetorical value

1 [See above, pp. 84, 35.]
143

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

were we forbidden to project words primarily
connoting our affections upon the objects by
which the affections are aroused. The man
is really hateful; the action really mean; the
situation really tragic — all in themselves and
quite apart from our opinion. We even go so
far as to talk of a weary road, a giddy height, a
jocund morning or a sullen sky; and the term
'indefinite' while usually applied only to our
apprehensions, functions as a fundamental
physical qualification of things in Spencer's
Maw of evolution,' and doubtless passes with
most readers for all right.

Psychologists, studying our perceptions of
movement, have unearthed experiences in
which movement is felt in general but not
ascribed correctly to the body that really
moves. Thus in optical vertigo, caused by
unconscious movements of our eyes, both we
and the external universe appear to be in a
whirl. When clouds float by the moon, it is as
if both clouds and moon and we ourselves
shared in the motion. In the extraordinary
case of amnesia of the Rev. Mr. Hanna, pub-

144

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

lished by Sidis and Goodhart in their import
ant work on Multiple Personality, we read that
when the patient first recovered consciousness
and "noticed an attendant walk across the
room, he identified the movement with that of
his own. He did not yet discriminate between
his own movements and those outside him
self." 1 Such experiences point to a primitive
stage of perception in which discriminations
afterwards needful have not yet been made.
A piece of experience of a determinate sort
is there, but there at first as a 'pure5 fact.
Motion originally simply is; only later is it
confined to this thing or to that. Something
like this is true of every experience, however
complex, at the moment of its actual presence.
Let the reader arrest himself in the act of read
ing this article now. Now this is a pure experi
ence, a phenomenon, or datum, a mere that or
content of fact. 'Reading* simply is, is there;
and whether there for some one's conscious
ness, or there for physical nature, is a question
not yet put. At the moment, it is there for

1 Page 102.
145

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

neither; later we shall probably judge it to
have been there for both.

With the affectional experiences which we
are considering, the relatively 'pure' condi
tion lasts. In practical life no urgent need has
yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them
as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical
facts. So they remain equivocal; and, as the
world goes, their equivocality is one of their
great conveniences.

The shifting place of 'secondary qualities' in
the history of philosophy l is another excellent
proof of the fact that 'inner' and 'outer' are
not coefficients with which experiences come to
us aboriginally stamped, but are rather results
of a later classification performed by us for
particular needs. The common-sense stage of
thought is a perfectly definite practical halt
ing-place, the place where we ourselves can
proceed to act unhesitatingly. On this stage
of thought things act on each other as well
as on us by means of their secondary quali-

1 [Cf. Janet and Seailles: History of the Problems of Philosophy,
trans, by Monahan, part i, ch. m.]

146

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

ties. Sound, as such, goes through the air
and can be intercepted. The heat of the fire
passes over, as such, into the water which it
sets a-boiling. It is the very light of the are-
lamp which displaces the darkness of the mid
night street, etc. By engendering and trans
locating just these qualities, actively efficacious
as they seem to be, we ourselves succeed in
altering nature so as to suit us; and until more
purely intellectual, as distinguished from prac
tical, needs had arisen, no one ever thought
of calling these qualities subjective. When,
however, Galileo, Descartes, and others found
it best for philosophic purposes to class sound,
heat, and light along with pain and pleasure
as purely mental phenomena, they could do so
with impunity.1

Even the primary qualities are undergoing
the same fate. Hardness and softness are ef
fects on us of atomic interactions, and the
atoms themselves are neither hard nor soft,
nor solid nor liquid. Size and shape are deemed

1 [Cf. Descartes: Meditation u ; Principles of Philosophy, part I,
XLVIII.]

147

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

subjective by Kantians; time itself is sub
jective according to many philosophers ; 1 and
even the activity and causal efficacy which
lingered in physics long after secondary quali
ties were banished are now treated as illusory
projections outwards of phenomena of our
own consciousness. There are no activities or
effects in nature, for the most intellectual
contemporary school of physical speculation.
Nature exhibits only changes, which habitually
coincide with one another so that their habits
are describable in simple 'laws.' 2

There is no original spirituality or material
ity of being, intuitively discerned, then ; but
only a translocation of experiences from one
world to another ; a grouping of them with
one set or another of associates for definitely
practical or intellectual ends.

I will say nothing here of the persistent
ambiguity of relations. They are undeniable
parts of pure experience; yet, while common
sense and what I call radical empiricism stand

1 [Cf. A. E. Taylor: Elements of Metaphysics, bk. in, ch. iv.]

2 [Cf. K. Pearson: Grammar of Science, ch. in.]

148

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

for their being objective, both rationalism and
the usual empiricism claim that they are ex
clusively the 'work of the mind' — the finite
mind or the absolute mind, as the case may be.

Turn now to those affective phenomena
which more directly concern us.

We soon learn to separate the ways in which
things appeal to our interests and emotions
from the ways in which they act upon one
another. It does not work to assume that phy
sical objects are going to act outwardly by
their sympathetic or antipathetic qualities.
The beauty of a thing or its value is no force
that can be plotted in a polygon of composi
tions, nor does its * use ' or c significance ' affect in
the minutest degree its vicissitudes or destiny
at the hands of physical nature. Chemical
'affinities' are a purely verbal metaphor; and,
as I just said, even such things as forces, ten
sions, and activities can at a pinch be regarded
as anthropomorphic projections. So far, then,
as the physical world means the collection of
contents that determine in each other certain

149

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

regular changes, the whole collection of our
appreciative attributes has to be treated as
falling outside of it. If we mean by physical
nature whatever lies beyond the surface of our
bodies, these attributes are inert throughout
the whole extent of physical nature.

Why then do men leave them as ambiguous
as they do, and not class them decisively as
purely spiritual ?

The reason would seem to be that, although
they are inert as regards the rest of physical
nature, they are not inert as regards that part
of physical nature which our own skin covers.
It is those very appreciative attributes of
things, their dangerousness, beauty, rarity,
utility, etc., that primarily appeal to our
attention. In our commerce with nature these
attributes are what give emphasis to objects;
and for an object to be emphatic, whatever
spiritual fact it may mean, means also that it
produces immediate bodily effects upon us,
alterations of tone and tension, of heart-beat
and breathing, of vascular and visceral action.
The 'interesting' aspects of things are thus

150

THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS

not wholly inert physically, though they be
active only in these small corners of physi
cal nature which our bodies occupy. That,
however, is enough to save them from being
classed as absolutely non-objective.

The attempt, if any one should make it, to
sort experiences into two absolutely discrete
groups, with nothing but inertness in one of
them and nothing but activities in the other,
would thus receive one check. It would receive
another as soon as we examined the more
distinctively mental group; for though in that
group it be true that things do not act on one
another by their physical properties, do not
dent each other or set fire to each other, they
yet act on each other in the most energetic
way by those very characters which are so
inert extracorporeally. It is by the interest
and importance that experiences have for us,
by the emotions they excite, and the purposes
they subserve, by their affective values, in
short, that their consecution in our several
conscious streams, as 'thoughts' of ours, is

mainly ruled. Desire introduces them; interest

151

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

holds them; fitness fixes their order and con
nection. I need only refer for this aspect of
our mental life, to Wundt's article 'Ueber
psychische Causalitat/ which begins Volume
X. of his Philosophische Studien.1.

It thus appears that the ambiguous or am
phibious status which we find our epithets of
value occupying is the most natural thing in
the world. It would, however, be an unnatural
status if the popular opinion which I cited
at the outset were correct. If 'physical' and
' mental' meant two different kinds of in
trinsic nature, immediately, intuitively, and
infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever
in whatever bit of experience it qualified,
one does not see how there could ever have
arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity.
But if, on the contrary, these words are
words of sorting, ambiguity is natural. For
then, as soon as the relations of a thing are
sufficiently various it can be sorted variously.

1 It is enough for my present purpose if the appreciative characters
but seem to act thus. Believers in an activity an sich, other than our
mental experiences of activity, will find some farther reflections on the
subject in my address on 'The Experience of Activity.' [The next
essay. Cf. especially, p. 169. ED.]

152 •

THE PLACE OF APFECTIONAL FACTS

Take a mass of carrion, for example, and the
'disgustingness' which for us is part of the
experience. The sun caresses it, and the
zephyr wooes it as if it were a bed of roses.
So the disgustingness fails to operate within
the realm of suns and breezes, — it does not
function as a physical quality. But the carrion
'turns our stomach' by what seems a direct
operation — it does function physically, there
fore, in that limited part of physics. We can
treat it as physical or as non-physical accord
ing as we take it in the narrower or in the wider
context, and conversely, of course, we must
treat it as non-mental or as mental.

Our body itself is the palmary instance of
the ambiguous. Sometimes I treat my body
purely as a part of outer nature. Sometimes,
again, I think of it as 'mine,' I sort it with
the 'me,' and then certain local changes and
determinations in it pass for spiritual happen
ings. Its breathing is my 'thinking,' its sen-
sorial adjustments are my 'attention,' its
kinesthetic alterations are my 'efforts,' its
visceral perturbations are my 'emotions.'

153

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

The obstinate controversies that have arisen
over such statements as these (which sound so
paradoxical, and which can yet be made so
seriously) prove how hard it is to decide by
bare introspection what it is in experiences
that shall make them either spiritual or ma
terial. It surely can be nothing intrinsic in
the individual experience. It is their way of
behaving towards each other, their system of
relations, their function; and all these things
vary with the context in which we find it
opportune to consider them.

I think I may conclude, then (and I hope
that my readers are now ready to conclude
with me), that the pretended spirituality of
our emotions and of our attributes of value,
so far from proving an objection to the philo
sophy of pure experience, does, when rightly
discussed and accounted for, serve as one of
its best corroborations.

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY1

BRETHREN OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION:

IN casting about me for a subject for your
President this year to talk about it has seemed
to me that our experiences of activity would
form a good one ; not only because the topic
is so naturally interesting, and because it has
lately led to a good deal of rather inconclusive
discussion, but because I myself am growing
more and more interested in a certain system
atic way of handling questions, and want to get
others interested also, and this question strikes
me as one in which, although I am painfully
aware of my inability to communicate new
discoveries or to reach definitive conclusions,
I yet can show, in a rather definite manner,
how the method works.

1 President's Address before the American Psychological Associa
tion, Philadelphia Meeting, December, 1904. [Reprinted from The
Psychological Review, vol. xn, No. 1, Jan., 1905. Also reprinted, with
some omissions, as Appendix B, A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 370-394.
Pp. 166-167 have also been reprinted in Some Problems of Philosophy,
p. 212. The present essay is referred to in ibid., p. 219, note. The
author's corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.)

155

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

The way of handling things I speak of, is, as
you already will have suspected, that known
sometimes as the pragmatic method, some
times as humanism, sometimes as Deweyism,
and in France, by some of the disciples of
Bergson, as the Philosophic nouvelle. Professor
Woodbridge's Journal of Philosophy1 seems
unintentionally to have become a sort of meet
ing place for those who follow these tenden
cies in America. There is only a dim identity
among them; and the most that can be said at
present is that some sort of gestation seems to
be in the atmosphere, and that almost any day
a man with a genius for finding the right word
for things may hit upon some unifying and
conciliating formula that will make so much
vaguely similar aspiration crystallize into
more definite form.

I myself have given the name of "radical
empiricism' to that version of the tendency in
question which I prefer; and I propose, if you
will now let me, to illustrate what I mean by
radical empiricism, by applying it to activity

1 [The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method*.]
156

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

as an example, hoping at the same time inci
dentally to leave the general problem of activ
ity in a slightly — I fear very slightly — more
manageable shape than before.

Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a
scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the
current literature of the subject — his own
writings included — one easily gathers what
he means. The opponents cannot even under
stand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr.
Ward: "I do not care what your oracle is,
and your preposterous psychology may here be
gospel if you please; . . . but if the revela
tion does contain a meaning, I will commit
myself to this : either the oracle is so confused
that its signification is not discoverable, or,
upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down
to any definite statement, then that state
ment will be false." 1 Mr. Ward in turn says
of Mr. Bradley: "I cannot even imagine the
state of mind to which his description applies.
. . . [It] reads like an unintentional travesty

1 Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp. 116-117. — Ob
viously written at Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.

157

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

of Herbartian psychology by one who has
tried to improve upon it without being at the
pains to master it."1 Miinsterberg excludes a
view opposed to his own by saying that with
any one who holds it a Verstdndigung with
him is " grundsdtzlich ausgeschlossen " ; and
Koyce, in a review of Stout,2 hauls him over
the coals at great length for defending 'effi
cacy' in a way which I, for one, never gath
ered from reading him, and which I have
heard Stout himself say was quite foreign to
the intention of his text.

In these discussions distinct questions are
habitually jumbled and different points of
view are talked of durcheinander.

( 1 ) There is a psychological question : ' f Have
we pjrcjegtions of activity? and if so, what are
they [like, and when and where do we have
them?"

(2) There is a metaphysical question : "Is
there a fact of activity ? and if so, what idea
must we frame of it? What is it like? and what

1 [Mind, vol. xn, 1887, pp. 573-574.]

2 Mind, N. S., vol. vi, [1897], p. 379.

158

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

does it do, if it does anything?" And finally
there is a logical question:

(3) "Whence do we know activity? By our
own feelings of it solely? or by some other
source of information?" Throughout page
after page of the literature one knows not
which of these questions is before one; and
mere description of the surface-show of experi
ence is preferred as if it implicitly answered
every one of them. No one of the disputants,
moreover, tries to show what pragmatic con
sequences his own view would carry, or what
assignable particular differences in any one's
experience it would make if his adversary's
were triumphant.

It seems to me that if radical empiricism be
good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic
method and its principle of pure" experience,
to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least
to simplify them somewhat. The pragmatic
method starts from the postulate that there is
no difference of truth that does n't make a
difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to
determine the meaning of all differences of

159

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon
as possible upon some practical or particular
issue. The principle of pure experience is also
a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be ad
mitted as fact, it says, except what can be
experienced at some definite time by some ex-
perient; and for every feature of fact ever so
experienced, a definite place must be found
somewhere in the final system of reality. In
other words: Everything real must be experi-
enceable somewhere, and every kind of thing
experienced must somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method let us see
what face theproblems of activity present to us.

By the principle of pure experience, either
the word 'activity' must have no meaning at
all, or else the original^type and model of what
it means must lie in some concrete kind of
experience that can be definitely pointed out.
Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventu
ally come to make regarding activity, that sort
of thing will be what the judgments are about.
The first 'step to take, then, is to ask where in
the stream of experience we seem to find what

160

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

we speak of as activity. What we are to think
of the activity thus found will be a later
question.

Now it is obvious that we are tempted to
affirm activity wherever we find anything
going on. Taken in the broadest sense, any
apprehension of something doing, is an expe
rience of activity. Were our world describ-
able only by the words * no thing happening/
'nothing changing/ 'nothing doing/ we should
unquestionably call it an 'inactive' world.
Bare activity then, as we may call it, means
the bare fact of event or change. ' Change tak
ing place' is a unique content of experience,
one of those 'conjunctive' objects which radi
cal empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabili
tate and preserve. The sense of activity is thus
in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous
with the sense of 'life.' We should feel our
own subjective life at least, even in noticing
and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world.
Our own reaction on its monotony would be
the one thing experienced there in the form of
something coming to pass.

161

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

This seems to be what certain writers have
in mind when they insist that for an experient
to be at all is to be active. It seems to justify,
or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expres
sion that we are only as we are active,1 for
we are only as experients; and it rules out Mr.
Bradley 's contention that "there is no original
experience of anything like activity." 2 What
we ought to say about activities thus ele
mentary, whose they are, what they effect, or
whether indeed they effect anything at all —
these are later questions, to be answered only
when the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable,
though there were no definite direction, no "
actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag move
ment, or a wild Ideenflucht, or Rhapsodic der
Wahrnehmungen, as Kant would say,3 would

1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. n, p. 245. One thinks natur
ally of the peripatetic actus primus and octus secundus here. ["Actus
autem est duplex: primus et secundus. Actus quidem primus est
forma, etintegritas sei. Actus autem secundus est operatic." Thomas
Aquinas : Summa Theologica, edition of Leo XIII, (1894), vol. i,
p. 391. Cf. also Blanc: Dictionnaire de Philosophic, under 'acte.'
ED.]

2 [Appearance and Reality, second edition, p. 116.]

3 [Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Werke, (1905), vol. IV, p. 110 (trans.
by Max MUller, second edition, p. 128).]

162

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

constitute an active as distinguished from an
inactive world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is
given, a part at least of the activity comes
with definite direction; it comes with desire
and sense of goal; it comes complicated with
resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to,
and with the efforts which the feeling of re
sistance so often provokes; and it is in com
plex experiences like these that the notions of
distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed
to activity arise. Here also the notion of
causal efficacy comes to birth. Perhaps the
most elaborate work ever done in descriptive
psychology has been the analysis by various
recent writers of the more complex activity-
situations.1 In their descriptions, exquisitely

1 I refer to such descriptive work as Ladd's (Psychology, Descriptive
and Explanatory, part i, chap, v, part n, chap, xi, part in, chaps.
xxv and xxvi); as Sully 's (The Human Mind, partv); as Stout's
(Analytic Psychology, book i, chap, vi, and bookn, chaps, i, n, and
in) ; as Bradley's (in his long series of analytic articles on Psychology
in Mind)', as Titchener's (Outline of Psychology, part i, chap, vi);
as Shand's (Mind, N. S., m, 449; iv, 450; vi, 289); as Ward's
(Mind, xii, 67; 564); as Loveday's (Mind, N. S., x, 455); as
Lipps's (Vom Fiihlen, Wollen und Denken, 1902, chaps, n, iv, vi) ;
and as Bergson's (Revue Philosophique, LIII, 1) — to mention only
a few writings which I immediately recall.

163

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

subtle some of them,1 the activity appears as
the gestaltqualitat or thefundirte inhalt (or as
whatever else you may please to call the con
junctive form) which the content falls into
when we experience it in the ways which the
describers set forth. Those factors in those
relations are what we mean by activity -situa
tions; and to the possible enumeration and
accumulation of their circumstances and in
gredients there would seem to be no natural
bound. Every hour of human life could con
tribute to the picture gallery; and this is the
only fault that one can find with such descrip
tive industry — where is it going to stop?
Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures
of what we have already in concrete form in
our own breasts? 2 They never take us off the
superficial plane. We knew the facts already —
less spread out and separated, to be sure — but

1 Their existence forms a curious commentary on Prof. Miinster-
berg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He himself has
contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his Willen-
shandlung, and in his Grundzuge [der Psychologie], part n, chap,
ix, § 7.

2 I ought myself to cry peccavi, having been a voluminous sinner in
my own chapter on the will. [Principles of Psychology, vol. u, chap.

XXVI.]

164

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

we knew them still. We always felt our own
activity, for example, as 'the expansion of an
idea with which our Self is identified, against
an obstacle'; 1 and the following out of such a
definition through a multitude of cases elabo
rates the obvious so as to be little more than an
exercise in synonymic speech.

All the descriptions have to trace familiar
outlines/ and to use familiar terms. The act
ivity is, for example, attributed either to a
physical or to a mental agent, and is either <
aimless or directed. If directed it shows ten
dency. The tendency may or may not be re
sisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as
when a body moves in empty space by its mo
mentum, or our thoughts wander at their own
sweet will. If resistance is met, its agent com
plicates the situation. If now, in spite of resist
ance, the original tendency continues, effort
makes its appearance, and along with effort,
strain or squeeze. Will, in the narrower sense
of the word, then comes upon the scene, when-

1 [Cf. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, second edition, pp.
96-97.J,

165

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ever, along with the tendency, the strain and
squeeze are sustained. But the resistance may
be great enough to check the tendency, or even
to reverse its path. In that case, we (if ' we ' were
the original agents or subjects of the tendency)
are overpowered. The phenomenon turns into
one of tension simply, or of necessity suc-
cumbed-to, according as the opposing power is
only equal, or is superior to ourselves.
^ Whosoever describes an experience in such
terms as these describes an experience of act
ivity. If the word have any meaning, it must
denote what there is found. There is complete
activity in its original and first intention.
What it is 'known-as' is what there appears.
The experiencer of such a situation possesses all
that the idea contains. He feels the tendency,
the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or
the passive giving up, just as he feels the time,
the space, the swiftness or intensity, the move
ment, the weight and color, the pain and pleas
ure, the complexity, or whatever remaining
characters the situation may involve. He goes
through all that ever can be imagined where

166

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

activity is supposed. If we suppose activities
to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms
like these that we must suppose them, or else
give them some other name; for the word
* activity ' has no imaginable content whatever
save these experiences of process, obstruction,
striving, strain, or release, ultimate qualia as
they are of the life given us to be known.

Were this the end of the matter, one might
think that whenever we had successfully lived
through an activity-situation we should have
to be permitted, without provoking contra
diction, to say that we had been really active,
that we had met real resistance and had really
prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an
entity all that is necessary is to gelten as an
entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, re
cognized, or in any way realized, as such.1 In
our activity-experiences the activity assur
edly fulfils Lotze's demand. It makes itself
gelten. It is witnessed at its work. No matter
what activities there may really be in this ex
traordinary universe of ours, it is impossible

1 [Cf. above, p. 59, note.]
167

ESSAYS IN RADJCAL EMPIRICISM

for us to conceive of any one of them being
either lived through or authentically known
otherwise than in this dramatic shape of some
thing sustaining a felt purpose against felt
obstacles and overcoming or, -being overcome.
What c sustaining ' means here is clear to anyone
who has lived through the experience, but to
no one else; just as 'loud/ "red/ c sweet/ mean
something only to beings with ears, eyes, and
tongues. The per dpi in these originals of ex
perience is the esse; the curtain is the picture.
If there is anything hiding in the background,
it ought not to be called activity, but should
get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might
well experience astonishment at finding so
many of the ablest writers on the subject
flatly denying that the activity we live through
in these situations is real. Merely to feel active
is not to be active, in their sight. The agents
that appear in the experience are not real
agents, the resistances do not really resist, the
effects that appear are not really effects at all.1

* Verborum gratid: "The feeling of activity is not able, gud feeling.

168

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

It is evident from this that mere descriptive
analysis of any one of our activity-experiences
is not the whole story, that there is something

to tell us anything about activity" (Loveday: Mind, N. S., vol. x,
[1901], p. 463); "A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is not,
looked at in another way, an experience of activity at all. It is a mere
sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the
idea of activity. . . . Whether this experience is or is not later on a
character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it
comes first, is not hi itself an experience of activity at all. It, as it
comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside
observer" (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, second edition, p. 605);
"In dem Tatigkeitsgefiihle liegt an sich nicht der geringste Beweis
filr das Vorhandensein einer psychischen Tatigkeit" (Munsterberg:
Grundziige der Psychologic). I could multiply similar quotations and
would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more
concrete, save that the mingling of different points of view in most of
these author's discussions (not in Miinsterberg's) make it impossible to
disentangle exactly what they mean. I am sure in any case, to be
accused of misrepresenting them totally, even in this note, by omission
of the context, so the less I name names and the more I stick to ab
stract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion, the safer
it will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may add to this note
a complaint on my own account. Professor Stout, in the excellent
chapter on ' Mental Activity,' in vol. I of his Analytic Psychology,
takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain mus
cular feelings and gives quotations to bear him out. They are from
certain paragraphs on 'the Self,' in which my attempt was to show
what the central nucleus of the activities that we call 'ours' is.
[Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 299-305.] I found it hi certain
intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose, as 'subject
ive,' to the activities of the .transcorporeal world. I sought to show
that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an
inner spiritual] agent as such (I should now say the activity of
'consciousness' as such, see [the first essay], 'Does Consciousness
Exist?'). There are, in fact, three distinguishable 'activities' in
the field of discussion: the elementary activity involved in the mere
that of experience, in the fact that something is going on, and the far
ther specification of this something into two whats, an activity felt as

169

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

still to tell about them that has led such able
writers to conceive of a Simon-pure activity,
of an activity an sich, that does, and does n't

'ours,' and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend him,
identifies 'our' activity with that of the total experience-process, and
when I circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a
sort of external appendage to itself (Stout: op. cit., vol. i, pp. 162-163),
as if I 'separated the activity from the process which is active.' But
all the processes in question are active, and their activity is inseparable
from their being. My book raised only the question of which activity
deserved the name of 'ours.' So far as we are 'persons,' and contrasted
and opposed to an 'environment,' movements in our body figure as
our activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are
ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which
the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,' and their
activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are here only
another name for the total process of experience, another name for all
that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and individualized
self exclusively in the passages with which Professor Stout finds fault.
The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing pro
perly called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The
world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness') comes
at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision, centre of ac
tion, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here'; when the body
acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all other things are
* there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of emphasized position
imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action
and interest which lies in the body; and the systematization is now so
instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no developed or active experience
exists for us at all except in that ordered form. So far as 'thoughts'
and 'feelings' can be active, their activity terminates in the activity
of the body, and only through first arousing its activities can they
begin to change those of the rest of the world. [Cf. also A Pluralistic
Universe, p. 344, note 8. ED.] The body is the storm centre, the origin
of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience-
train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its point of view.
The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position, just like 'this' and
'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position have prerogative empha
sis, and, if activities have feelings, must be felt in a peculiar way. The

170

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

merely appear to us to do, and compared with
whose real doing all this phenomenal activity
is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and
I think that the state of mind of one possessed
by it is often something like this : " It is all very
well," we may imagine him saying, "to talk
about certain experience-series taking on the
form of feelings of activity, just as they might
take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose
that they do so; suppose we feel a will to stand
a strain. Does our feeling do more than record
the fact that the strain is sustained? The real
activity, meanwhile, is the doing of the fact;
and what is the doing made of before the record
is made. What in the will enables it to act thus?
And these trains of experience themselves, in
which activities appear, what makes them go
at all? Does the activity in one bit of experi
ence bring the next bit into being? As an em-
word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis. I see no inconsistency
whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my' activities as unique and
opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the other hand, in affirming,
after introspection, that they consist in movements in the head. The
' my ' of them is the emphasis, the feeling of perspective-interest in
which they are dyed.

171 '

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

piricist you cannot say so, for you have just
declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic
object, or conjunctive relation experienced be
tween bits of experience already made. But
what made them at all? What propels experi
ence uberhaupt into being? There is the act
ivity that operates; the activity felt is only
its superficial sign."

To the metaphysical question, popped upon
us in this way, I must pay serious attention
ere I end my remarks; but, before doing so, let
me show that without leaving the immediate
reticulations of experience, or asking what
makes activity itself act, we still find the dis
tinction between less real and more real act
ivities forced upon us, and are driven to much
soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane.

We must not forget, namely, in talking of
the ultimate character of our activity-experi
ences, that each of them is but a portion of a
wider world, one link in the vast chain of pro
cesses of experience out of which history is
made. Each partial process, to him who lives
through it, defines itself by its origin and its

172

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

goal; but to an observer with a wider mind-
span who should live outside of it, that goal
would appear but as a provisional halting-
place, and the subjectively felt activity would
be seen to continue into objective activities
that led far beyond. We thus acquire a habit,
in discussing activity-experiences, of defining
them by their relation to something more. If
an experience be one of narrow span, it will be
mistaken as to what activity it is and whose.
You think that you are acting while you are
only obeying someone's push. You think you
are doing this, but you are doing something of
which you do not dream. For instance, you
think you are but drinking this glass; but you
are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will
end your days. You think you are just driv
ing this bargain, but, as Stevenson says some
where, you are laying down a link in the policy
of mankind.

Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his
wider field of vision, regards the ultimate out
come of an activity as what it is more really
doing; and the most previous agent ascertain-

173

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

able, being the first source of action, he regards
as the most real agent in the field. The others
but transmit that agent's impulse; on him
we put responsibility; we name him when one
asks us ' Who 's to blame ? '

But the most previous agents ascertainable,
instead of being of longer span, are often of
much shorter span than the activity in view.
Brain-cells are our best example. My brain-
cells are believed to excite each other from
next to next (by contiguous transmission of
katabolic alteration, let us say) and to have
been doing so long before this present stretch
of lecturing-activity on my part began. If any
one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing
will cease or show disorder of form. Cessante
causa, cessat et effectus — does not this look as
if the short-span brain activities were the more
real activities, and the lecturing activities
on my part only their effects ? Moreover, as
Hume so clearly pointed out,1 in my mental
activity-situation the words physically to be

1 [Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sect, vn, part I,
Selby-Bigge's edition, pp. 65 ff.J

174

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

uttered are represented as the activity's im
mediate goal. These words, however, cannot
be uttered without intermediate physical pro
cesses in the bulb and vagi nerves, which pro
cesses nevertheless fail to figure in the mental
activity-series at all. That series, therefore,
since it leaves out vitally real steps of action,
cannot represent the real activities. It'is some
thing purely subjective; the facts of activity
are elsewhere. They are something far more
interstitial, so to speak, than what my feelings
record.

The real facts of activity that have in point
of fact been systematically pleaded for by
philosophers have, so far as my information
goes, been of three principal types.

The first type takes a consciousness of wider
time-span than ours to be the vehicle of the
more real activity. Its will is the agent, and its
purpose is the action done.

The second type assumes that 'ideas' strug
gling with one another are the agents, and
that the prevalence of one set of them is the
action.

175

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

The third type believes that nerve-cells are
the agents, and that resultant motor discharges
are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize our immediately
felt activity-situations for the benefit of either
of these types of substitute, we ought to know
what the substitution practically involves.
What practical difference oi^ht it to make if,
instead of saying naively that 'I' am active
now in delivering this address, I say that a
wider thinker is active, or that certain ideas are
active, or that certain nerve-cells are active, in
producing the result?

This would be the pragmatic meaning of the
three hypotheses. Let us take them in succes
sion in seeking a reply.

If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident
that his purposes envelope mine. I am really
lecturing for him; and although I cannot surely
know to what end, yet if I take him religiously,
I can trust it to be a good end, and willingly
connive. I can be happy in thinking that my
activity transmits his impulse, and that his
ends prolong my own. So long as I take him

176

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my
activities. He tends rather to corroborate the
reality of them, so long as I believe both them
and him to be good.

When now we turn to ideas, the case is dif
ferent, inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the
association psychology to influence each other
only from next to next. The 'span' of an idea
or pair of ideas, is assumed to be much smaller
instead of being larger than that of my total
conscious field. The same results may get
worked out in both cases, for this address is
being given anyhow. But the ideas supposed
to 'really' work it out had no prevision of the
whole of it; and if I was lecturing for an abso
lute thinker in the former case, so, by similar
reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me,
that is, accomplishing unwittingly a result
which I approve and adopt. But, when this
passing lecture is over, there is nothing in the
bare notion that ideas have been its agents
that would seem to guarantee that my present
purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. I may

have ulterior developments in view; but there

177

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

is no certainty that my ideas as such will wish
to, or be able to, work them out.

The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents.
The activity of a nerve-cell must be conceived
of as a tendency of exceedingly short reach, an
' impulse' barely spanning the way to the next
cell — for surely that amount of actual ( pro
cess' must be ' experienced' by the cells if what
happens between them is to deserve the name
of activity at all. But here again the gross
resultant, as I perceive it, is indifferent to the
agents, and neither wished or willed or fore
seen. Their being agents now congruous with
my will gives me no guarantee that like results
will recur again from their activity. In point
of fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My
mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental ob
structions, and frustrations generally, are also
results of the activity of cells. Although these
are letting me lecture now, on other occasions
they make me do things that I would willingly
not do.

The question Whose is the real activity? is
thus tantamount to the question What will be

178

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

the actual results? Its interest is dramatic; how
will things work out? If the agents are of
one sort, one way; if of another sort, they may
work out very differently. The pragmatic
meaning of the various alternatives, in short,
is great. It makes no merely verbal difference
which opinion we take up.

You see it is the old dispute come back!
Materialism and teleology; elementary short-
span actions summing themselves 'blindly,' or
far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.

Naively we believe, and humanly and dra
matically we like to believe, that activities
both of wider and of narrower span are at
work in life together, that both are real, and
that the long-span tendencies yoke the others
in their service, encouraging them in the right
direction, and damping them when they tend
in other ways. But how to represent clearly
the modus operandi of such steering of small
tendencies by large ones is a problem which
metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate
upon for many years to come. Even if such

control should eventually grow clearly pictur-

179

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

able, the question how far it is successfully
exerted in this actual world can be answered
only by investigating the details of fact. No
philosophic knowledge of the general nature
and constitution of tendencies, or of the rela
tion of larger to smaller ones, can help us to
predict which of all the various competing
tendencies that interest us in this universe are
likeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical
fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out
their purpose, but we know also that they are
often defeated by the failure of some com-
temptibly small process on which success de
pends. A little thrombus in a statesman's
meningeal artery will throw an empire out of
gear. I can therefore not even hint at any solu
tion of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished
to show you that that issue is what gives the
real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of
activity may be real. Are the forces that really
act in the world more foreseeing or more blind?
As between 'our' activities as 'we' experience
them, and those of our ideas, or of our brain-
cells, the issue is well-defined.

180

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

I said a while back 1 that I should return to
the 'metaphysical' question before ending; so,
with a few words about that, I will now close
my remarks.

In whatever form we hear this question pro
pounded, I think that it always arises from two
things, a belief that causality must be exerted
in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is
made. If we take an activity -situation at its
face-value, it seems as if we caught inflagrante
delicto the very power that makes facts come
and be. I now am eagerly striving, for ex
ample, to get this truth which I seem half to
perceive, into words which shall make it show
more clearly. If the words come, it will seem as
if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them
into actuality out from the state of merely
possible being in which they were. How is this
feat performed? How does the pulling pull?
How do I get my hold on words not yet exist
ent, and when they come by what means have
I made them come? Really it is the problem of
creation; for in the end the question is : How do

1 Page 172.
181

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

I make them be? Real activities are those
that really make things be, without which
the things are not, and with which they are
there. Activity, so far as we merely feel it, on
the other hand, is only an impression of ours,
it may be maintained ; and an impression is,
for all this way of thinking, only a shadow of
another fact.

Arrived at this point, I can do little more
than indicate the principles on which, as it
seems to me, a radically empirical philosophy
is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.

If there be real creative activities in being,
radical empiricism must say, somewhere they
must be immediately lived. Somewhere the
that of efficacious causing and the what of it
must be experienced in one, just as the what
and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one
whenever a man has the sensation of cold here
and now. It boots not to say that our sensa
tions are fallible. They are indeed; but to see
the thermometer contradict us when we say ' it
is cold ' does not abolish cold as a specific na
ture from the universe. Cold is in the arctic

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our
train is moving when the train beside our win
dow moves, to see the moon through a tele
scope come twice as near, or to see two pic
tures as one solid when we look through a
stereoscope at them, leaves motion, near
ness, and solidity still in being — if not here,
yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And
wherever the seat of real causality is, as ulti
mately known 'for true' (in nerve-processes,
if you will, that cause our feelings of "act
ivity as well as the movements which these
seem to prompt), a philosophy of pure experi
ence can consider the real causation as no other
nature of thing than that which even in our
most erroneous experiences appears to be at
work. Exactly what appears there is what we
mean by working, though we may later come
to learn that ^working was not exactly there.
Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with
effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achiev
ing our intention — this is action, this is effect
uation in the only shape in which, by a pure
experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it

183

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation
in its first intention, here is causality at work.1
To treat this offhand as the bare illusory sur
face of a world whose real causality is an un
imaginable ontological principle hidden in the
cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of
thinking, only animism in another shape. You
explain your given fact by your 'principle,' but
the principle itself, when you look clearly at it,
turns out to be nothing but a previous little
spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one
and only kind of fact your mind, considering
causality, can never get.2.

1 Let me not be told that this contradicts [the first essay], 'Does
Consciousness Exist ?' (see especially page 32), in which it was said
that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures
work 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water
wets, etc.) but not in the thoughts. Mental activity-trains are com
posed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other, they
check, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely
associational as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my reply,
they do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize phy
sically. One thought in every developed activity-series is a desire or
thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a feeling tone
from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this. The interplay
of these secondary tones (among which 'interest,' 'difficulty,' and
'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mental series. In what we term
the physical drama these qualities play absolutely no part. The
subject needs careful working out; but I can see no inconsistency.

2 I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the
assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misun
derstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say

184

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation
as an ultimate nature, as a 'category/ if you
like, of reality, is just what we feel it to be, just
that kind of conjunction which our own activ
ity-series reveal. We have the whole butt and
being of it in our hands; and the healthy thing

that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on Effort
and on Will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express. [Principles
of Psychology, vol. n, ch. xxvi.] I owe all my doctrines on this sub
ject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any
rate then was) an out and out phenomenist, a denier of 'forces' in the
most strenuous sense. [Cf. Ch. Renouvier: Esquisse d'une Classifi
cation SystSmatique des Doctrines Philosophiques (1885), vol. n, pp.
390-392; Essais de Critique Generale (1859), vol. n, §§ ix, xiii. For
an acknowledgment of the author's general indebtedness to Re
nouvier, cf. Some Problems of Philosophy, p. 165, note. ED.] Single
clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connection, may
possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of
energy; but I defy anyone to show a single sentence which, taken
with its context, should be naturally held to advocate that view. The
misinterpretation probably arose at first from my defending (after
Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts. 'Free will' was supposed
by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain
history the only 'free will' I have ever thought of defending is the
character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. If an activity-pro
cess is the form of a whole 'field of consciousness,' and if each field of
consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly
admitted) but has its elements unique (since in that situation they
are all dyed in the total) then novelty is perpetually entering the
world and what happens there is not pure repetition, as the dogma
of the literal uniformity of nature requires. Activity-situations come,
in short, each with an original touch. A 'principle' of free will if
there were one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena,
but I never saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do
except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should
be invoked.

185

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

for philosophy is to leave off grubbing under
ground for what effects effectuation, or what
makes action act, and to try to solve the con
crete questions of where effectuation in this
world is located, of which things are the true
causal agents there, and of what the more
remote effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublim
ity traditionally attributed to the metaphysi
cal inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely dis
appears. If we could know what causation
really and transcendentally is in itself, the only
use of the knowledge would be to help us to
recognize an actual cause when we had one,
and so to track the future course of opera
tions more intelligently out. The mere ab
stract inquiry into causation's hidden nature
is not more sublime than any other inquiry
equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more
sublime level than anything else. It lives,
apparently, in the dirt of the world as well
as in the Absolute, or in man's unconquerable
mind. The worth and interest of the world

consists not in its elements, be these elements

186

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

things, or be they the conjunctions of things;
it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in
the whole process, and in the meaning of the
succession stages which the elements work out.
My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in
a page of his review of Stout's Analytic Psy
chology * has some fine words on this point
with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree
with his separating the notion of efficacy from
that of activity altogether (this I understand
to be one contention of his) for activities are
efficacious whenever J:hey are real activities at
all. But the inner nature both of efficacy and
of activity are superficial problems, I under
stand Royce to say; and the only point for us
in solving them would be their possible use in
helping us to solve the far deeper problem of
the course and meaning of the world of life.
Life, says our colleague, is full of significance,
of meaning, of success and of defeat, of hoping
and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of
inner value. It is a total presence that em
bodies worth. To live our own lives better in

1 Mind, N. S.. vol. vi, 1897; cf. pp. 392-393.
187

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

this presence is the true reason why we wish to
know the elements of things; so even we psy
chologists must end on this pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus
more concrete. They are all problems of the
true relation of longer-span to shorter-span
activities. When, for example, a number of
' ideas' (to use the name traditional in psy
chology) grow confluent in a larger field of
consciousness, do the smaller activities still
co-exist with the wider activities then experi
enced by the conscious subject ? And, if so,
do the wide activities accompany the narrow
ones inertly, or do they exert control ? Or do
they perhaps utterly supplant and replace
them and short-circuit their effects? Again,
when a mental activity-process and a brain-
cell series of activities both terminate in the
same muscular movement, does the mental
process steer the neural processes or not? Or,
on the other hand, does it independently short-
circuit their effects? Such are the questions
that we must begin with. But so far am I from
suggesting any definitive answer to such ques-

188

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY

tions, that I hardly yet can put them clearly.
They lead, however, into that region of pan-
psychic and ontologic speculation of which
Professors Bergson and Strong have lately en
larged the literature in so able and interest
ing a way.1 The results of these authors seem
in many respects dissimilar, and I understand
them as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help
suspecting that the direction of their work is
very promising, and that they have the hunt
er's instinct for the fruitful trails.

1 [Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. vi (on Bergson) ; H. Bergson:
Creative Evolution, trans, by A. Mitchell; C. A. Strong: Why the Mind
has a Body, ch. xn. ED.]

VII

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM*

HUMANISM is a ferment that has 'come to
stay.' 2 It is not a single hypothesis or the
orem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is
rather a slow shifting in the philosophic per
spective, making things appear as from a new
centre of interest or point of sight. Some
writers are strongly conscious of the shifting,
others half unconscious, even though their own
vision may have undergone much change. The
result is no small confusion in debate, the half-
conscious humanists often taking part against
the radical ones, as if they wished to count
upon the other side.3

1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. n, No. 5, March 2, 1905. Also reprinted, with
slight changes in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 121-135. The author's
corrections have been adopted for the present text. ED.]

2 [Written apropos of the appearance of three articles in Mind, N. S.,
vol. xiv, No. 53, January, 1905: " ' Absolute ' and ' Relative ' Truth,"
H. H. Joachim; "Professor James on' Humanism and Truth,' " H. W.
B. Joseph; "Applied Axioms," A. Sidgwick. Of these articles the
second and third "continue the humanistic (or pragmatistic) con
troversy," the first "deeply connects with it." ED.]

1 Professor Baldwin, for example. His address ' On Selective Think
ing' (Psychological Review, [vol. v], 1898, reprinted in his volume,
Development and Evolution) seems to me an unusually well-written

190

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

If humanism really be the name for such .
a shifting of perspective, it is obvious that
the whole scene of the philosophic stage will
change in some degree if humanism prevails.
The emphasis of things, their foreground and
background distribution, their sizes and val
ues, will not keep just the same.1 If such
pervasive consequences be involved in human
ism, it is clear that no pains which philoso
phers may take, first in defining it, and then in
furthering, checking, or steering its progress,
will be thrown away.

It suffers badly at present from incomplete
definition. Its most systematic advocates,
Schiller and Dewey, have published fragment-
pragmatic manifesto. Nevertheless in 'The Limits of Pragmatism*
(ibid., [vol. xi], 1904), he (much less clearly) joins in the attack.

1 The ethical changes, it seems to me, are beautifully made evident
in Professor Dewey 's series of articles, which will never get the atten
tion they deserve till they are printed in a book. I mean: 'The
Significance of Emotions,' Psychological Review, vol. n, [1895], p. 13;
'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,' ibid., vol. in, [1896], p. 357;
'Psychology and Social Practice,' ibid., vol. vn, [1900], p. 105;
'Interpretation of Savage Mind, 'ibid., vol. ix, [1902], p. 217; 'Green's
Theory of the Moral Motive,' Philosophical Review, vol. I, [1892], p.
593; 'Self-realization as the Moral Ideal,' ibid., vol. II, [1893], p. 652;
'The Psychology of Effort,' ibid., vol. vi, [1897], p. 43; 'The Evolu
tionary Method as Applied to Morality,' ibid., vol. XT, [1902], pp.
107, 353; 'Evolution and Ethics,' Monist, vol. vm, [1898], p. 321; to
mention only a few.

191

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ary programs only; and its bearing on many
vital philosophic problems has not been traced
except by adversaries who, scenting heresies in
advance, have showered blows on doctrines —
subjectivism and scepticism, for example —
that no good humanist finds it necessary to
entertain. By their still greater reticences, the
anti-humanists have, in turn, perplexed the
humanists. Much of the controversy has in
volved the word 'truth.' It is always good in
debate to know your adversary's point of viewT
authentically. But the critics of humanism
never define exactly what the word 'truth'
signifies when they use it themselves. The
humanists have to guess at their view; and
the result has doubtless been much beating of
the air. Add to all this, great individual differ
ences in both camps, and it becomes clear that
nothing is so urgently needed, at the stage
which things have reached at present, as a
sharper definition by each side of its central
point of view.

Whoever will contribute any touch of

sharpness will help us to make sure of what's

192

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

what and who is who. Anyone can contribute
such a definition, and, without it, no one
knows exactly where he stands. If I offer my
own provisional definition of humanism * now
and here, others may improve it, some adver
sary may be led to define his own creed more
sharply by the contrast, and a certain quicken
ing of the crystallization of general opinion
may result.

The essential service of humanism, as I con
ceive the situation, is to have seen that though
one part of our experience may lean upon an
other part to make it what it is in any one of sev
eral aspects in which it may be considered, ex
perience as a whole is self-containing and leans
on nothing.

Since this formula also expresses the main
contention of transcendental idealism, it needs
abundant explication to make it;unambigu-

1 [The author employs the term 'humanism* either as a synonym
for 'radical empiricism' (cf. e.g., above, p. 156); or as that general
philosophy of life of which 'radical empiricism' is the theoretical
ground (cf. below, p. 194). For other discussions of 'humanism,' cf.
below, essay xi, and The Meaning of Truth, essay HI. ED.]

193

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ous. It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to
denying theism and pantheism. But, in fact,
it need not deny either ; everything would
depend on the exegesis; and if the formula
ever became canonical, it would certainly
develop both right-wing and left-wing inter
preters. I myself read humanism theistically
and pluralistically. If there be a God, he is
no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the
experiencer of widest actual conscious span.
Read thus, humanism is for me a religion
susceptible of reasoned defence, though I am
well aware how many minds there are to whom
it can appeal religiously only when it has
been monistically translated. Ethically the
pluralistic form of it takes for me a stronger
hold on reality than any other philosophy I
know of — it being essentially a social philo
sophy, a philosophy of 'co,' in which con
junctions do the work. But my primary reason
for advocating it is its matchless intellectual
economy. It gets rid, not only of the stand
ing "problems' that monism engenders ('pro
blem of evil/ 'problem of freedom,' and the

194

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and
paradoxes as well.

It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic
controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypo
thesis of trans-empirical reality at all. It gets
rid of any need for an absolute of the Brad-
leyan type (avowedly sterile for intellectual
purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive
relations found within experience are fault
lessly real. It gets rid of the need of an abso
lute of the Roycean type (similarly sterile) by
its pragmatic treatment of the problem of
knowledge [a treatment of which I have al
ready given a version in two very inadequate
articles].1 As the views of knowledge, reality ••
and truth imputed to humanism have been
those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in
regard to these ideas that a sharpening of
focus seems most urgently required. I proceed
therefore to bring the views which 7 impute
to humanism in these respects into focus as
briefly as I can.

1 [Omitted from reprint in Meaning of Truth. The articles re
ferred to are 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure
Experience,' reprinted above.]

195

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM
II

If the central humanistic thesis, printed
above in italics, be accepted, it will follow
that, if there be any such thing at all as know
ing, the knower and the object known must
both be portions of experience. One part of
experience must, therefore, either

(1) Know another part of experience — in
other words, parts must, as Professor Wood-
bridge says,1 represent one another instead of
representing realities outside of ' conscious
ness' — this case is that of conceptual know
ledge; or else

(2) They must simply exist as so many ulti
mate thats or facts of being, in the first in
stance; and then, as a secondary complication,
and without doubling up its entitative single
ness, any one and the same that must figure
alternately as a thing known and as a know
ledge of the thing, by reason of two divergent
kinds of context into which, in the general
course of experience, it gets woven.2 ,

1 In Science, November 4, 1904, p. 599.

8 This statement is probably excessively obscure to any one who

196

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

This second case is that of sense-perception.
There is a stage of thought that goes beyond
common sense, and of it I shall say more pre
sently; but the common-sense stage is a per
fectly definite ^halting-place of thought, pri
marily for purposes of action; and, so long
as we remain on the common-sense stage of
thought, object and subject fuse in the fact of
* presentation' or sense-perception — the pen
and hand which I now see writing, for example,
are the physical realities which those words
designate. In this case there is no self-tran
scendency implied in the knowing. Human
ism, here, is only a more comminuted Identi-
tdtsphilosophie.1

In case (1), on the contrary, the represent
ative experience does transcend itself in know
ing the other experience that is its object. No
one can talk of the knowledge of the one by the
other without seeing them as numerically dis
tinct entities, of which the one lies beyond the
other and away from it, along some direction

has not read my two articles, 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A
World of Pure Experience.'
1 [Cf. above, p. 134; and below, p. 202.]

197

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

and with some interval, that can be definitely
named. But, if the talker be a humanist, he
must also see this distance-interval concretely
and pragmatically, and confess it to consist
of other intervening experiences — of possible
ones, at all events, if not of actual. To call my
present idea of my dog, for example, cognitive
of the real dog means that, as the actual tissue
of experience is constituted, the idea is capable
of leading into a chain of other experiences
on my part that go from next to next and
terminate at last in vivid sense-perceptions
of a jumping, barking, hairy body. Those are
the real dog, the dog's full presence, for my
common sense. If the supposed talker is a
profound philosopher, although they may not
be the real dog for him, they mean the real dog,
are practical substitutes for the real dog, as
the representation was a practical substitute
for them, that real dog being a lot of atoms,
say, or of mind-stuff, that lie where the sense-
perceptions lie in his experience as well as in
my own.

198

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

III

The philosopher here stands for the stage of
thought that goes beyond the stage of com
mon sense; and the difference is simply that he
'interpolates' and ' extrapolates,' where com
mon sense does not. For common sense, two
men see the same identical real dog. Philo
sophy, noting actual differences in their per
ceptions, points out the duality of these latter,
and interpolates something between them as
a more real terminus — first, organs, viscera,
etc.; next, cells; then, ultimate atoms; lastly,
mind-stuff perhaps. The original sense-term
ini of the two men, instead of coalescing with
each other and with the real dog-object, as at
first supposed, are thus held by philosophers to
be separated by invisible realities with which,
at most, they are conterminous.

Abolish, now, one of the percipients, and
the interpolation changes into 'extrapolation.'
The sense-terminus of the remaining percipient
is regarded by the philosopher as not quite
reaching reality. He has only carried the pro
cession of experiences, the philosopher thinks,

199

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

to a definite, because practical, halting-place
somewhere on the way towards an absolute
truth that lies beyond.

The humanist sees all the time, however,
that there is no absolute transcendency even
about the more absolute realities thus con
jectured or believed in. The viscera and cells
are only possible percepts following upon that
of the outer body. The atoms again, though
we may never attain to human means of per
ceiving them, are still defined perceptually.
The mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind
of experience; and it is possible to frame the
hypothesis (such hypotheses can by no logic
be excluded from philosophy) of two knowers
of a piece of mind-stuff and the mind-stuff
itself becoming f confluent' at the moment at
which our imperfect knowing might pass into
knowing of a completed type. Even so do you
and I habitually represent our two perceptions
and the real dog as confluent, though only pro
visionally, and for the common-sense stage
of thought. If my pen be inwardly made of
mind-stuff, there is no confluence now between

200

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

that mind-stuff and my visual perception of
the pen. But conceivably there might come to
be such confluence; for, in the case of my hand,
the visual sensations and the inward feelings
of the hand, its mind-stuff, so to speak, are even
now as confluent as any two things can be.

There is, thus, no breach in humanistic
epistemology. Whether knowledge be taken
as ideally perfected, or only as true enough to
pass muster for practice, it is hung on one con
tinuous scheme. Reality, howsoever remote, is
always defined as a terminus within the general
possibilities of experience; and what knows it is
defined as an experience that 'represents9 it, in
the sense of being substitutable for it in our think-
ing because it leads to the same associates, or
in the sense of 'pointing to it9 through a chain
of other experiences that either intervene or
may intervene.

Absolute reality here bears the same relation
to sensation as sensation bears to conception
or imagination. Both are provisional or final
termini, sensation being only the terminus
at which the practical man habitually stops,

201

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

while the philosopher projects a 'beyond' in
the shape of more absolute reality. These
termini, for the practical and the philosophi
cal stages of thought respectively, are self-
supporting. They are not 'true' of anything
else, they simply are, are real. They 'lean
on nothing/^as my italicized formula said.
Rather does the whole fabric of experience
lean on them, just as the whole fabric of the
solar system, including many relative posi
tions, leans, for its absolute position in space,
on any one of its constituent stars. Here,
again, one gets a new Identitatsphilosophie in
pluralistic form.1

If I have succeeded in making this at all
clear (though I fear that brevity and abstract-
ness between them may have made me fail),
the reader will see that the 'truth' of our men
tal operations must always be an intra-experi-
ential affair. A conception is reckoned true by
common sense when it can be made to lead to a

1 M. above, pp. 134, 197.]
202

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

sensation. The sensation, which for common
sense is not so much 'true' as 'real/ is held to
be provisionally true by the philosopher just
in so far as it covers (abuts at, or occupies the
place of) a still more absolutely real experi
ence, in the possibility of which to some re
moter experient the philosopher finds reason
to believe.

Meanwhile what actually does count for true
to any individual trower, whether he be philo
sopher or common man, is always a result of his
apperceptions. If a novel experience, concept
ual or sensible, contradict too emphatically our
pre-existent system of beliefs, in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred it is treated as false.
Only when the older and the newer experiences
are congruous enough to mutually apperceive
and modify each other, does what we treat as
an advance in truth result. [Having written of
this point in an article in reply to Mr. Joseph's
criticism of my humanism, I will say no more
about truth here, but refer the reader to that
review.1] In no case, however, need truth

1 [Omitted from reprint in Meaning of Truth. The review re-
203

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

consist in a relation between our experiences
and something archetypal or trans-experien
tial. Should we ever reach absolutely terminal
experiences, experiences in which we all agreed,
which were superseded by no revised continu
ations, these would not be true, they would be _
real, they would simply be, and be indeed the
angles, corners, and linchpins of all reality, on
which the truth of everything else would be
stayed. Only such other things as led to these
by satisfactory conjunctions would be 'true.5
Satisfactory connection of some sort with such
termini is all that the word 'truth' means.
On the common-sense stage of thought sense-
presentations serve as such termini. Our ideas
and concepts and scientific theories pass for
true only so far as they harmoniously lead back
to the world of sense.

I hope that many humanists will endorse
this attempt of mine to trace the more essen
tial features of that way of viewing things. I
feel almost certain that Messrs. Dewey and

ferred to is reprinted below, pp. 244-265, under the title " Human
ism and Truth Once More." ED.]

£04

THE ESSENCE OF HUMANISM

Schiller will do so. If the attackers will also
take some slight account of it, it may be that
discussion will be a little less wide of the mark
than it has hitherto been.

VIII

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE1

JE voudrais vous communique! quelques
doutes qui me sont venus au sujet de la notion
de Conscience qui regne dans tous nos traites
de psychologic.

On definit habituellement la Psychologic
comme la Science des fails de Conscience, ou
des phenomenes, ou encore des etats de la Con
science. Qu'on admette qu'elle se rattache a
des moi personnels, ou bien qu'on la croie im-
personnelle a la fagon du "moi transcendental"
de Kant, de la Bewusstheit ou du Bewusstsein
ilberhaupt de nos eontemporains en Allemagne,
cette conscience est toujours regardee comme
possedant une essence propre, absolument
distincte de 1'essence des choses materielles,
qu'elle a le don mysterieux de representer et de

1 [A communication made (in French) at the Fifth International
Congress of Psychology, in Rome, April 30, 1905. It is reprinted from
\hzArchivesde Psychologie,vo\. v, No. 17, June, 1905.] Cette commu
nication est le resume, forcement tres condense, de vues que 1'auteur a
exposees, au cours de ces derniers mois, en une serie d'articles publics
dans le Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,
1904 et 1905. [The series of articles referred to is reprinted above. ED.]

206

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

connaitre. Les fails materials, pris dans leur
materialite, ne sont pas eprouves, ne sont pas
objets d'experience, ne se rapportent pas. Pour
qu'ils prennent la forme du systeme dans lequel
nous nous sentons vivre, il f aut qu'ils apparais-
sent, et ce fait d'apparaltre, surajoute a leur
existence brute, s'appelle la conscience que
nous en avons, ou peut-etre, selon 1'hypothese
panpsychiste, qu'ils ont d'eux-memes.

Voila ce dualisme invetere qu'il semble im
possible de chasser de notre vue du monde. Ce
monde peut bien exister en soi, mais nous
n'en savons rien, car pour nous il est exclusive-
ment un objet d'experience; et la condition
indispensable a cet effet, c'est qu'il soit rap-
porte a des temoins, qu'il soit connu par un
sujet ou par des sujets spirituels. Objet et
sujet, voila les deux jambes sans lesquelles il
semble que la philosophic ne saurait faire un
pas en avant.

Toutes les ecoles sont d'accord la-dessus,
scolastique, cartesianisme, kantisme, neo-kan-
tisme, tous admettent le dualisme fondamen-
tal. Le positivisme ou agnosticisme de nos

207

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

jours, qui se pique de relever des sciences
naturelles, se donne volontiers, il est vrai, le
nom de monisme. Mais ce n'est qu'un mo-
nisme verbal. II pose une realite inconnue,
mais nous dit que cette realite se presente tou-
jours sous deux "aspects," un cote conscience
et un cote matiere, et ces deux 'cotes demeu-
rent aussi irreductibles que les attributs fon-
damentaux, etendue et pensee, du Dieu de
Spinoza. Au fond, le monisme contemporain
est du spinozisme pur.

Or, comment se represente-t-on cette con
science dont nous sommes tous si portes a
admettre 1'existence? Impossible de la definir,
nous dit-on, mais nous en avons tous une in
tuition immediate : tout d'abord la conscience a
conscience d'elle-meme. Demandez a la pre
miere personne que vous rencontrerez, homme
ou femme, psychologue ou ignorant, et elle
vous repondra qu'elle se sent penser, jouir,
souffrir, vouloir, tout comme elle se sent re-
spirer. Elle pergoit directement sa vie spirit-
uelle comme une espece de courant interieur,
actif, leger, fluide, delicat, diaphane pour ainsi

208

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

dire, et absolument oppose a quoi que ce soil
de materiel. Bref, la vie subjective ne parait
pas seulement etre une condition logiquement
indispensable pour qu'il y ait un monde ob-
jectif qui apparaisse, c'est encore un element
de Pexperience meme que nous eprouvons di-
rectement, au meme titre que nous eprouvons
notre propre corps.

Idees et Choses, comment done ne pas recon-
naitre leur dualisme? Sentiments et Ob jets,
comment douter de leur heterogeneite absolue?

La psychologic soi-disant scientifique admet
cette heterogeneite comme 1'ancienne psycho
logic spiritualiste Tadmettait. Comment ne pas
Tadmettre? Chaque science decoupe arbitraire-
ment dans la trame des f aits un champ ou elle
se parque, et dont elle decrit et etudie le con-
tenu. La psychologic prend justement pour
son domaine le champ des faits de conscience.
Elle les postule sans les critiquer, elle les oppose
aux faits materiels; et sans critiquer non plus
la notion de ces derniers, elle les rattache a
la conscience par le lien mysterieux de la con-
naissancey de Yaperception qui, pour elle, est

209

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

un troisieme genre de fait fondamental et
ultime. En suivant cette voie, la psychologic
contemporaine a fete de grands triomphes.
Elle a pu faire une esquisse de 1'evolution de
la vie consciente, en concevant cette derniere
comme s'adaptant de plus en plus complete-
ment au milieu physique environnant. Elle
a pu etablir un parallelisme dans le dualisme,
celui des faits psychiques et des evenements
cerebraux. Elle a explique les illusions, les
hallucinations, et jusqu'a un certain point, les
maladies mentales. Ce sont de beaux progres;
mais il reste encore bien des problemes. La
philosophic generale surtout, qui a pour devoir
de scruter tous les postulats, trouve des para
doxes et des empechements la ou la science
passe outre; et il n'y a que les amateurs de
science populaire qui ne sont jamais perplexes.
Plus on va au fond des choses, plus on trouve
d'enigmes; et j'avoue pour ma part que depuis
que je m'occupe serieusement de psychologic,
ce vieux dualisme de matiere et de pensee,
cette heterogeneite posee comme absolue des
deux essences, m'a toujours presente des diffi-

210

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

cultes. C'est de quelques-unes de ces difficul-
tes que je voudrais maintenant vous entretenir.
D'abord il y en a une, laquelle, j'en suis
convaincu, vous aura frappes tous. Prenons la
perception exterieure, la sensation directe que
nous donnent par exemple les murs de eette
salle. Peut-on dire ici que le psychique et le
physique sont absolument heterogenes? Au
contraire, ils sont si peu heterogenes que si
nous nous plagons au point de vue du sens
commun; si nous faisons abstraction de toutes
les inventions explicatives, des molecules et des
ondulations etherees, par exemple, qui au fond
sont des entites metaphysiques; si, en un mot,
nous prenons la realite naivement et telle
qu'elle nous est donnee tout d'abord, cette
realite sensible d'ou dependent nos interets
vitaux, et sur laquelle se portent toutes nos
actions; eh bien, cette realite sensible et la
sensation que nous en avons sont, au moment
ou la sensation se produit, absolument iden-
tiques Tune a Pautre. La realite est 1'apercep-
tion meme. Les mots "murs de cette salle" ne
signifient que cette blancheur fralche et sonore

211

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

qui nous entoure, coupee par ces fenfires,
bornee par ces lignes et ces angles. Le physique
ici n'a pas d'autre contenu que le psychique.
Le sujet et Fobjet se confondent.

C'est Berkeley qui le premier a mis cette
verite en honneur. 'Esse est percipi. Nos sen
sations ne sont pas de petits duplicats in-
terieurs des choses, elles sont les choses memes
en tant que les choses nous sont presentes. f Et
quoi que Ton veuille penser de la vie absente,
cachee, et pour ainsi dire privee, des choses, et
quelles que soient les constructions hypothe-
tiques qu'on en fasse, il reste vrai que la vie
publique des choses, cette actualite presente
par laquelle elles nous confrontent, d'ou deri-
vent toutes nos constructions theoriques, et
a laquelle elles doivent toutes revenir et se
rattacher sous peine de flotter dans Fair et
dans 1'irreel; cette actualite, dis-je, est homo-
gene, et non pas seulement homogene, mais
numeriquement une, avec une certaine partie
de notre vie interieure.

Voila pour la perception exterieure. Quand
on s'adresse a 1'imagination, a la memoire ou

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

aux facultes de representation abstraite, bien
que les faits soient ici beaucoup plus compli-
ques, je crois que la meme homogeneite essen-
tielle se degage. Pour simplifier le probleme,
excluons d'abord toute realite sensible. Pre-
nons la pensee pure, telle qu'elle s'effectue dans
le reve ou la reverie, ou dans la memoire du
passe. Ici encore, 1'etoffe de 1'experience ne
fait-elle pas double emploi, le physique et le
psychique ne se confondent-ils pas? Si je reve
d'une montagne d'or, elle n'existe sans doute
pas en dehors du reve, mais dans le reve elle est
de nature ou d'essence parfaitement physique,
c'est comme physique qu'elle m'apparait. Si en
ce moment je me permets de me souvenir de
ma maison en Amerique, et des details de mon
embarquement recent pour 1'Italie, le pheno-
menepur, le fait qui se produit, qu'est-il? C'est,
dit-on, ma pensee, avec son contenu. Mais en
core ce contenu, qu'est-il? II porte la forme
d'une partie du monde reel, partie distante, il
est vrai, de six mille kilometres d'espace et de
six semaines de temps, mais reliee a la salle ou
nous sommes par une foule de choses, objets

213

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

et evenements, homogenes d 'une part avec la
salle et d'autre part avec 1'objet de mes sou
venirs.

Ce contenu ne se donne pas comme etant
d'abord un tout petit fait interieur que je
projetterais ensuite au loin, il se presente d'em-
blee comme le fait eloigne meme. Et 1'acte de
penser ce contenu, la conscience que j'en ai,
que sont-ils? Sont-ce au fond autre chose que
des manieres retrospectives de nommer le
contenu lui-meme, lorsqu'on 1'aura separe de
tous ces intermediates physiques, et relie a
un nouveau groupe d'associes qui le font ren
tier dans ma vie mentale, les emotions par
exemple qu'il a eveillees en moi, 1'attention
que j'y porte, mes idees de tout a 1'heure qui
1'ont suscite comme souvenir? Ce n'est qu'en
se rapportant a ces derniers associes que le
phenomene arrive a etre classe comme pensee;
tant qu'il ne se rapporte qu'aux premiers il
demeure phenomene objectif. X

II est vrai que nous opposons habituelle-
ment nos images interieures aux objets, et que
nous les considerons comme de petites copies,

£14

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

comme des caiques ou doubles, affaiblis, de ces
derniers. C'est qu'un objet present a une
vivacite et une nettete superieures a celles de
Timage. II lui fait ainsi contraste; et pour
me servir de 1'excellent mot de Taine, il lui
sert de reducteur. Quand les deux sont pre
sents ensemble, 1'objet prend le premier plan
et 1'image "recule," devient une chose "ab-
sente." Mais cet objet present, qu'est-il en
lui-meme? De quelle etoffe est-il fait? De la
meme etoffe que 1'image. II est fait de sensa
tions; il est chose pergue. Son esse est percipi,
et lui et 1'image sont generiquement homogenes.

r~~

Si je pense en ce moment a mon chapeau que
j'ai laisse tout a 1'heure au vestiaire, ou est
le dualisme, le discontinu, entre le chapeau
pense et le chapeau reel ? C'est d'un vrai
chapeau absent que mon esprit s'occupe. J'en
tiens compte pratiquement comme d'une
realite. S'il etait present sur cette table, le
chapeau determinerait un mouvement de ma
main: je 1'enleverais. De m£me ce chapeau
conQu, ce chapeau en idee, determinera tan-
tot la direction de mes pas. J'irai le prendre.

215

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

L'idee que j'en ai se continuera jusqu'a la
presence sensible du chapeau, et s'y fondra
harmonieusement.J

Je conclus done que, — bien qu'il y ait un
dualisme pratique — puisque les images se
distinguent des objets, en tiennent lieu, et
nous y menent, il n'y a pas lieu de leur at-
tribuer une difference de nature essentielle.
Pensee et actualite sont faites d'une seule et
meme etoffe, qui est 1'etoffe de 1'experience en
general.

La psychologie de la perception exterieure
nous mene a la meme conclusion. Quand
j'apergois Fob jet devant moi comme une table
de telle forme, a telle distance, on m'explique
que ce fait est du a deux facteurs, a une ma-
tiere de sensation qui me penetre par la vole
des yeux et qui donne 1'element d'exteriorite
reelle, et a des idees qui se reveillent, vont a
la rencontre de cette realite, la classent et
l'interpretent. Mais qui peut f aire la part,
dans la table concretement apergue, de ce qui
est sensation et de ce qui est idee? L'externe et
1'interne, 1'etendu et Tinetendu, se fusionnent

216

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

et font un mariage indissoluble. Cela rappelle
ces panoramas circulaires, ou des objets reels,
rochers, herbe, chariots brises, etc., qui occu-
pent 1'avant-plan, sont si ingenieusement re
lies a la toile qui fait le fond, et qui repre-
sente une bataille ou un vaste paysage, que
Ton ne salt plus distinguer ce qui est objet de
ce qui est peinture. Les coutures et les joints
sont imperceptibles.

Cela pourrait-il advenir si 1'objet et 1'idee
etaient absolument dissemblables de nature?

Je suis convaincu que des considerations
pareilles a celles que je viens d'exprimer au-
ront deja suscite, chez vous aussi, des doutes
au sujet du dualisme pretendu.

Et d'autres raisons de douter surgissent
encore. II y a toute une sphere d'adjectifs et
d'attributs qui ne sont ni objectifs, ni sub-
jectifs d'une maniere exclusive, mais que nous
employons tantot d'une maniere et tantot
d 'une autre, comme si nous nous complaisions
dans leur ambigui'te. Je parle des qualites
que nous apprecions, pour ainsi dire, dans les

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

choses, leur cote esthetique, moral, leur valeur
pour nous. La beaute, par exemple, ou reside-
t-elle? Est-elle dans la statue, dans la sonate,
ou dans notre esprit? Mon collegue a Har
vard, George Santayana, a ecrit un livre d'es-
thetique,1 ou il appelle la beaute "le plaisir
objectifie"; et en verite, c'est bien ici qu'on
pourrait parler de projection au dehors. On
dit indifferemment une chaleur agreable, ou
une sensation agreable de chaleur. La rarete,
le precieux du diamant nous en paraissent des
qualites essentielles. Nous parlons d'un orage
affreux, d'un homme ha'issable, d'une action
indigne, et nous croyons parler objectivement,
bien que ces termes n'expriment que des
rapports a notre sensibilite emotive propre.
Nous disons meme un chemin penible, un ciel
triste, un coucher de soleil superbe. Toute
cette maniere animiste de regarder les choses
qui parait avoir ete la fagon primitive de pen-
ser des hommes, peut tres bien s'expliquer (et
M. Santayana, dans un autre livre tout recent,2

1 The Sense of Beauty, pp. 44 ff.

2 The Life of Reason [vol. i, "Reason in Common Sense," p. 142].

218

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

Pa bien expliquee ainsi) par Phabitude d'attri-
buer a Pobjet tout ce que nous ressentons en sa
presence. Le partage du subjectif et de Pob-
jectif est le fait d'tme reflexion tres avancee,
que nous aimons encore ajourner dans beau-
coup d'endroits. Quand les besoins pratiques
ne nous en tirent pas forcement, il semble que
nous aimons a nous bercer dans le vague.

Les qualites secondes elles-memes, chaleur,
son, lumiere, n'ont encore aujourd'hui qu'une
attribution vague. Pour le sens commun, pour
la vie pratique, elles sont absolument objec
tives, physiques. Pour le physicien, elles sont
subjectives. Pour lui, il n'y a que la forme,
la masse, le mouvement, qui aient une realite
exterieure. Pour le philosophe idealiste, au
contraire, forme et mouvement sont tout aussi
subjectifs que lumiere et chaleur, et il n'y a
que la chose-en-soi inconnue, le "noumene,"
qui jouisse d'une realite extramentale com
plete.

Nos sensations intimes conservent encore de
cette ambiguite. II y a des illusions de mouve
ment qui prouvent que nos premieres sen-

219

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

sations de mouvement etaient generalisees.
C'est le monde entier, avec nous, qui se mou-
vait. Maintenant nous distinguons notre pro-
pre mouvement de celui des objets qui nous
entourent, et parmi les objets nous en dis
tinguons qui demeurent en repos. Mais il est
des etats de vertige ou nous retombons encore
aujourd'hui dans 1'indifferenciation premiere.
Vous connaissez tous sans doute cette the-
orie qui a voulu f aire des emotions des sommes
de sensations viscerales et musculaires. Elle a
donne lieu a bien des controverses, et aucune
opinion n'a encore conquis 1'unanimite des
suffrages. Vous connaissez aussi les contro
verses sur la nature de 1'activite mentale. Les
uns soutiennent qu'elle est une force purement
spirituelle que nous sommes en etat d'aperce-
voir immediatement comme telle. Les autres
pretendent que ce que nous nommons activite
mentale (effort, attention, par exemple) n'est
que le reflet senti de certains effets dont notre
organisme est le siege, tensions musculaires au
crane et au gosier, arret ou passage de la
respiration, afflux de sang, etc.

220

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

De quelque maniere que se resolvent ces con-
troverses, leur existence prouve bien clairement
une chose, c'est qu'il est tres difficile, ou meme
absolument impossible de savoir, par la seule
inspection intime de certains phenomenes, s'ils
sont de nature physique, occupant de Fetendue,
etc., ou s'ils sont de nature purement psychique
et interieure. II nous faut toujours trouver des
raisons pour appuyer notre avis; il nous faut
chercher la classification la plus probable du
phenomene; et en fin decompte il pourrait bien
se trouver que toutes nos classifications usuelles
eussent eu leurs motifs plutot dans les besoins
de la pratique que dans quelque faculte que
nous aurions d'apercevoir deux essences ul-
times et diverses qui composeraient ensemble la
trame des choses. Le corps de chacun de nous
offre un contraste pratique presque violent a
tout le reste du milieu ambiant. Tout ce qui
arrive au dedans de ce corps nous est plus in-
time et important que ce qui arrive ailleurs. II
s'identifie avec notre moi, il se classe avec lui.
Ame, vie, soufHe, qui saurait bien les dis-
tinguer exactement? Meme nos images et nos

221

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

souvenirs, qui n'agissent sur le monde physique
que par le moyen de notre corps, semblent ap-
partenir a ce dernier. Nous les traitons comme
internes, nous les classons avec nos sentiments
affectifs. II faut bien avouer, en somme, que
la question du dualisme de la pensee et de la
matiere est bien loin d'etre finalement resolue.

Et voila terminee la premiere partie de mon
discours. J'ai voulu vous penetrer, Mesdames
et Messieurs, de mes doutes et de la realite,
aussi bien que de 1'importance, du probleme.

Quant a moi, apres de longues annees d'hesi-
tation, j'ai fini par prendre mon parti carre-
ment. Je crois que la conscience, telle qu'on se
la represente communement, soit comme en-
tite, soit comme activite pure, mais en tout
cas comme fluide, inetendue, diaphane, vide
de tout contenu propre, mais se connaissant
directement elle-meme, spirituelle enfin, je
crois, dis-je, que cette conscience est une pure
chimere, et que la somme de realites concretes
que le mot conscience devrait couvrir, merite
une toute autre description, description, du
reste, qu'une philosophic attentive aux faits et

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

sachant faire un peu d'analyse, serait desor-
mais en etat de f ournir ou plutot de commencer
a fournir. Et ces mots m'amenent a la seconde
partie de mon discours. Elle sera beaucoup
plus courte que la premiere, parce que si je la
developpais sur la meme echelle, elle serait
beaucoup trop longue. II faut, par consequent,
que je me restreigne aux seules indications
indispensables.

Admettons que la conscience, la Bewusstheit,
congue comme essence, entite, activite, moitie
irreductible de chaque experience, soit sup-
primee, que le dualisme fondamental et pour
ainsi dire ontologique soit aboli et que ce que
nous supposions exister soit seulement ce qu'on
a appele jusqu'ici le contenu, le Inhalt, de la
conscience; comment la philosophic va-t-elle se
tirer d'affaire avec Pespece de monisme vague
qui en resultera ? Je vais tacher de vous insinuer
quelques suggestions positives la-dessus, bien
que je craigne que, faute du developpement
necessaire, mes idees ne repandront pas une
clarte tres grande. Pourvu que j'indique un

223

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

commencement de sentier, ce sera peut-etre
assez.

Au fond, pourquoi nous accrochons-nous
d'une maniere si tenace a cette idee d'une con
science surajoutee a 1'existence du contenu des
choses? Pourquoi la reclamons-nous si forte-
ment, que celui qui la nierait nous semblerait
plut6t un mauvais plaisant qu'un penseur?
N'est-ce pas pour sauver ce fait indeniable que
le contenu de 1'experience n'a pas seulement
une existence propre et comme immanente et
intrinseque, mais que chaque partie de ce con
tenu deteint pour ainsi dire sur ses voisines,
rend compte d'elle-meme a d'autres, sort en
quelque sorte de soi pour £tre sue et qu'ainsi
tout le champ de 1'experience se trouve etre
transparent de part en part, ou constitue
comme un espace qui serait rempli de miroirs?

Cette bilateralite des parties de 1'experience,
— a savoir d'une part, qu'elles sont avec des
qualites propres; d'autre part, qu'elles sont
rapportees ^ d'autres parties et sues — 1'opin-
ion regnante la constate et 1'explique par un
dualisme f ondamental de constitution apparte-

224

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

nant a chaque morceau d'experience en propre.
Dans cette feuille de papier il n'y a pas seule-
ment, dit-on, le contenu, blancheur, minceur,
etc., mais il y a ce second fait de la conscience
de cette blancheur et de cette minceur. Cette
fonction d'etre "rapporte," de faire partie de la
trame entiere d'une experience plus compre
hensive, on 1'erige en fait ontologique, et on
loge ce fait dans 1'interieur m^me du papier, en
1'accouplant a sa blancheur et a sa minceur.
Ce n'est pas un rapport extrinseque qu'on
suppose, c'est une moitie du phenomene m£me.
Je crois qu'en somme on se represente la
realite comme constitute de la faQon dont sont
faites les "couleurs" qui nous servent a la
peinture. II y a d'abord des matieres coloran-
tes qui repondent au contenu, et il y a un ve-
hicule, huile ou colle, qui les tient en suspen
sion et qui repond a la conscience. C'est un
dualisme complet, ou, en employant certains
precedes, on peut separer chaque element de
Tautre par voie de soustraction. C'est ainsi
qu'on nous assure qu'en faisant un grand effort
d'abstraction introspective, nous pouvons sai-

225

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

sir notre conscience sur le vif, comme une
activite spirituelle pure, en negligeant & peu
pres completement les matieres qu'£ un
moment donne elle eclaire.

Maintenant je vous demande si on ne pour-
rait pas tout aussi bien renverser absolument
cette maniere de voir. Supposons, en effet,
que la realite premiere soit de nature neutre,
et appelons-la par quelque nom encore ambigu,
comme phenomene, donne, Vorfindung. Moi-
meme j'en parle volontiers au pluriel, et je lui
donne le nom ft experiences pures. Ce sera un
monisme, si vous voulez, mais un monisme tout
a fait rudimentaire et absolument oppose au
soi-disant monisme bilateral du positivisme
scientifique ou spinoziste.

Ces experiences pures existent et se succe-
dent, entrent dans des rapports infiniment
varies les unes avec les autres, rapports qui
sont eux-memes des parties essentielles de la
trame des experiences. II y a " Conscience "de
ces rapports au m£me titre qu'il y a "Con
science" de leurs termes. II en resulte que des
groupes d'experiences se font remarquer et

226

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

distinguer, et qu'une seule et meme experience,
vu la grande variete de ses rapports, peut
jouer un role dans plusieurs groupes a la fois.
C'est ainsi que dans un certain contexte de
voisins, elle serait classee comme un phe-
nomene physique, tandis que dans un autre
entourage elle figurerait comme un fait de
conscience, a peu pres comme une m£me par-
ticule d'encre peut appartenir simultanement
a deux lignes, Tune verticale, Pautre horizon-
tale, pourvu qu'elle soit situee a leur inter
section.

Prenons, pour fixer nos idees, Pexperience
que nous avons a ce moment du local oft nous
sommes, de ces murailles, de cette table, de ces
chaises, de cet espace. Dans cette experience
pleine, concrete et indivise, telle qu'elle est la,
donnee, le monde physique objectif et le monde
interieur et personnel de chacun de nous se
rencontrent et se fusionnent comme des lignes
se fusionnent a leur intersection. Comme chose
physique, cette salle a des rapports avec tout
le reste du batiment, b&timent que nous autres
nous ne connaissons et ne connaitrons pas.

227

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Elle doit son existence a toute une histoire de
financiers, d'architectes, d'ouvriers. Elle pese
sur le sol; elle durera indefiniment dans le
temps; si le feu y eclatait, les chaises et la
table qu'elle contient seraient vite reduites
en cendres.

Comme experience personnelle, au contraire,
comme chose "rapportee," connue, consciente,
cette salle a de tout autres tenants et aboutis-
sants. Ses antecedents ne sont pas des ouvri-
ers, ce sont nos pensees respectives de tout a
1'heure. Bientot elle ne figurera que comme
un fait fugitif dans nos biographies, associe a
d'agreables souvenirs. Comme experience psy-
chique, elle n'a aucun poids, son ameublement
n'est pas combustible. Elle n'exerce de force
physique que sur nos seuls cerveaux, et beau-
coup d'entre nous nient encore cette influence;
tandis que la salle physique est en rapport
d'influence physique avec tout le reste du
monde.

Et pourtant c'est de la meme salle absolu-
ment qu'il s'agit dans les deux cas. Tant que
nous ne faisons pas de physique speculative,

228

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

tant que nous nous plagons dans le sens com-
mun, c'est la salle vue et sentie qui est bien la
salle physique. De quoi parlons-nous done si
ce n'est de cela, de cette meme partie de la
nature materielle que tous nos esprits, a ce
meme moment, embrassent, qui entre telle
quelle dans 1 'experience actuelle et intime de
chacun de nous, et que notre souvenir re-
gardera tou jours comme une partie integrante
de notre histoire. C'est absolument une meme
etoffe qui figure simultanement, selon le con-
texte que Ton considere, comme fait materiel
et physique, ou comme fait de conscience
intime.

Je crois done qu'on ne saurait traiter con
science et matiere comme etant d'essence dis
parate. On n'obtient ni 1'une ni 1'autre par
soustraction, en negligeant chaque fois 1'autre
moitied'une experience de composition double.
Les experiences sont au contraire primitive-
ment de nature plutot simple. Elles deviennent
conscientes dans leur entier, elles deviennent
physiques dans leur entier; et c'est par voie
(T addition que ce resultat se realise. Pour au-

229

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

tant que des experiences se prolongent dans le
temps, entrent dans des rapports d'influence
physique, se brisant, se chauffant, s'eclairant,
etc., mutuellement, nous en faisons un groupe
a part que nous appelons le monde physique.
Pour autant, au contraire, qu'elles sont fugi
tives, inertes physiquement, que leur succes
sion ne suit pas d'ordre determine, mais semble
plutot obeir a des caprices emotifs, nous en
faisons un autre groupe que nous appelons le
monde psychique. C'est en entrant a present
dans un grand nombre de ces groupes psy-
chiques que cette salle devient maintenant
chose consciente, chose rapportee, chose sue.
En faisant desormais partie de nos biographies
respectives, elle ne sera pas suivie de cette sotte
et monotone repetition d'elle-m£me dans le
temps qui caracterise son existence physique.
Elle sera suivie, au contraire, par d'autres
experiences qui seront discontinues avec elle,
ou qui auront ce genre tout particulier de con-
tinuite que nous appelons souvenir. Demain,
elle aura eu sa place dans chacun de nos
passes; mais les presents divers auxquels tous

230

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

ces passes seront lies demain seront bien differ-
ents du present dont cette salle jouira demain
comme entite physique.

i Les deux genres de groupes sont formes
d 'experiences, mais les rapports des experiences
entre elles different d'un groupe a 1'autre.
C'est done par addition d'autres phenomenes
qu'un phenomene donne devient conscient ou
connu, ce n'est pas par un dedoublement
d'essence interieure. La connaissance des
choses leur survient, elle ne leur est pas im-
manente. Ce n'est le fait ni d'un moi tran
scendental, ni d'une Bewusstheit ou acte de
conscience qui les animerait chacune. Elles se
connaissent Vune Vautre, ou plutot il y en a qui
connaissent les autres; et le rapport que nous
nommons connaissance n'est lui-meme, dans
beaucoup de cas, qu'une suite d'experiences
intermediates parfaitement susceptibles d'etre
decrites en termes concrets. II n'est nullement
le mystere transcendant ou se sont complus
tant de philosophes.

Mais ceci nous menerait beaucoup trop loin.
Je ne puis entrer ici dans tous les replis de la

231

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

theorie de la connaissance, ou de ce que, vous
autres Italiens, vous appelez la gnoseologie. Je
dois me contenter de ces remarques ecourtees,
ou simples suggestions, qui sont, je le crains,
encore bien obscures faute des developpements
necessaires.

Permettez done que je me resume — trop
sommairement, et en style dogmatique —
dans les six theses suivantes:

1° La Conscience, telle qu'on Ventend ordi-
nairement, n'existe pas, pas plus que la Matiere,
a laquelle Berkeley a donne le coup de grace;

2° Ce qui existe et forme la part de verite que le
mot de "Conscience" recouvre, c'est la suscep-
tibilite que possedent les parties de I ^experience
d'etre rapportees ou connues;

3° Cette susceptibilite s'explique par le fait
que certaines experiences peuvent mener les unes
aux autres par des experiences intermediates
nettement caracterisees, de telle sorte que les unes
se trouvent jouer le role de choses connues, les
autres celui de sujets connaissants ;

4° On pent parfaitement definir ces deux roles
232

LA NOTION DE CONSCIENCE

sans sortir de la trame de V experience meme, et
sans invoquer rien de transcendant ;

5° Les attributions sujet et objet, represents et
representatif, chose et pensee, signifient done une
distinction pratique qui est de la derniere impor
tance, mais qui est d'ordre FONCTIONNEL seule-
ment, et nullement ontologique comme le dualisme
dassique se la represente;

6° En fin de compte, les choses et les pensees ne
sont point foncierement heterogenes, mais elles
sontfaites d'une meme etoffe, etoffe qu9on ne peut
definir comme telle9 mais seulement eprouver, et
que I' on peut nommer, si on veut, V etoffe de
V experience en general.

IS RADICAL EMPIRICISM SOLIP-
SISTIC?

IF all the criticisms which the humanistic
Weltanschauung is receiving were as sachgemdss
as Mr. Bode's,2 the truth of the matter would
more rapidly clear up. Not only is it excel
lently well written, but it brings its own point
of view out clearly, and admits of a perfectly
straight reply.

The argument (unless I fail to catch it) can
be expressed as follows :

If a series of experiences be supposed, no one
of which is endowed immediately with the self-
transcendent function of reference to a reality
beyond itself, no motive will occur within the
series for supposing anything beyond it to
exist. It will remain subjective, and content
edly subjective, both as a whole and in its

several parts.

1 [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol. n, No. 9. April 27, 1905.]

8 [B. H. Bode: "'Pure Experience' and the External World,"
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. n,
1905, p. 128.]

234

IS EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC?

Radical empiricism, trying, as it does, to
account for objective knowledge by means of
such a series, egregiously fails. It can not
explain how the notion of a physical order, as
distinguished from a subjectively biographical
order, of experiences, ever arose.

It pretends to explain the notion of a physi
cal order, but does so by playing fast and loose
with the concept of -objective reference. On
the one hand, it denies that such reference
implies self -transcendency on the part of any
one experience; on the other hand, it claims
that experiences point. But, critically con
sidered, there can be no pointing unless self-
transcendency be also allowed. The conjunc
tive function of pointing, as I have assumed it,
is, according to my critic, vitiated by the fal
lacy of attaching a bilateral relation to a term
a quo, as if it could stick out substantively and
maintain itself in existence in advance of the
term ad quern which is equally required for it
to be a concretely experienced fact. If the
relation be made concrete, the term ad quern is
involved, which would mean (if I succeed in

235

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

apprehending Mr. Bode rightly) that this
latter term, although not empirically there, is
yet noetically there, in advance — in other
words it would mean that any experience that
'points' must already have transcended itself ,
in the ordinary ' epistemological' sense of the
word transcend.

Something like this, if I understand Mr.
Bode's text, is the upshot of his state of mind.
It is a reasonable sounding state of mind, but
it is exactly the state of mind which radical
empiricism, by its doctrine of the reality of
conjunctive relations, seeks to dispel. I very
much fear — so difficult does mutual under
standing seem in these exalted regions — that
my able critic has failed to understand that
doctrine as it is meant to be understood. I
suspect that he performs on all these conjunc
tive relations (of which the aforesaid 'point
ing' is only one) the usual rationalistic act of
substitution — he takes them not as they are
given in their first intention, as parts consti
tutive of experience's living flow, but only as
they appear in retrospect, each fixed as a

236

IS EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC?

determinate object of conception, static, there
fore, and contained within itself.

Against this rationalistic tendency to treat
experience as chopped up into discontinuous
static objects, radical empiricism protests. It
insists on taking conjunctions at their 'face-
value,' just as they come. Consider, for ex
ample, such conjunctions as 'and,' 'with,'
'near,' 'plus,9 'towards.' While we live in such
conjunctions our state is one of transition in
the most literal sense. We are expectant of a
'more' to come, and before the more has come,
the transition, nevertheless, is directed towards
it. I fail otherwise to see how, if one kind of
more comes, there should be satisfaction and
feeling of fulfilment; but disappointment if
the more comes in another shape. One more
will continue, another more will arrest or
deflect the direction, in which our experience
is moving even now. We can not, it is true,
name our different living 'ands' or 'withs'
except by naming the different terms towards
which they are moving us, but we live their
specifications and differences before those

237

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

; -

terms explicitly arrive. Thus, though the
various 'ands' are all bilateral relations, each
requiring a term ad quern to define it when
viewed in retrospect and articulately con
ceived, yet in its living moment any one of
them may be treated as if it 'stuck out' from
its term a quo and pointed in a special direc
tion, much as a compass-needle (to use Mr.
Bode's excellent simile) points at the pole,
even though it stirs not from its box.

In Professor Hoffding's massive little art
icle in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods,1 he quotes~a saying of
Kierkegaard's to the effect that we live for
wards, but we understand backwards. Under
standing backwards is, it must be confessed, a
very frequent weakness of philosophers, both
of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiri
cist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on
understanding forwards also, and refuses to
substitute static concepts of the understand
ing for transitions in our moving life. A logic
similar to that which my critic seems to employ

1 Vol. II, [1905], pp. 85-02.

238

IS EMPIRICISM SOLIPSISTIC?

here should, it seems to me, forbid him to say
that our present is, while present, directed
towards our future, or that any physical
movement can have direction until its goal is
actually reached.

At this point does it not seem as if the
quarrel about self -transcendency in knowledge
might drop? Is it not a purely verbal dispute?
Call it self-transcendency or call it pointing,
whichever you like — it makes no difference
so long as real transitions towards real goals
are admitted as things given in experience, and
among experience's most indefeasible parts.
Radical empiricism, unable to close its eyes to
the transitions caught in actu, accounts for the
self-transcendency or the pointing (whichever
you may call it) as a process that occurs within i
experience, as an empirically mediated thing
of which a perfectly definite description can
be given. 'Epistemology,' on the other hand,
denies this; and pretends that the self -tran
scendency is unmediated or, if mediated, then
mediated in a super-empirical world. To jus
tify this pretension, epistemology has first to

239

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

transform all our conjunctions into static
objects, and this, I submit, is an absolutely
arbitrary act. But in spite of Mr. Bode's mal
treatment of conjunctions, as I understand
them — and as I understand him — I believe
that at bottom we are fighting for nothing dif
ferent, but are both defending the same con
tinuities of experience in different forms of
words.

There are other criticisms in the article in
question, but, as this seems the most vital one,
I will for the present, at any rate, leave them
untouched.

MR. PITKIN'S REFUTATION OF
'RADICAL EMPIRICISM'*

ALTHOUGH Mr. Pitkin does not name me in
his acute article on radical empiricism,2 [. . . ]
I fear that some readers, knowing me to have
applied that name to my own doctrine, may
possibly consider themselves to have been in at
my death.

In point of fact my withers are entirely
un wrung. I have, indeed, said3 that 'to be
radical, an empiricism must not admit into its
constructions any element that is not directly
experienced.' But in my own radical empiri
cism this is only a methodological postulate, not
a conclusion supposed to flow from the intrin
sic absurdity of transempirical objects. I have
never felt the slightest respect for the idealistic

1 [Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods, vol.m, No. 26, December 20, 1906; and ibid., vol.
iv. No. 4, February 14, 1907, where the original is entitled "A Reply
to Mr. Pitkin." ED.]

1 [W. B. Pitkin: "A Problem of Evidence in Radical Empiricism/'
ibid., vol. m. No. 24, November 22, 1906. ED.]

• [Above, p. 42. ED.]

241

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

arguments which Mr. Pitkin attacks and of
which Ferrier made^such striking use; and I
am perfectly willing to admit any number of
noumenal beings or events into philosophy if
only their pragmatic value can be shown.

Radical empiricism and pragmatism have so
many misunderstandings to suffer from, that
it seems my duty not to let this one go any
farther, uncorrected.

Mr. Pitkin's * reply ' to me,1 [. . . ] perplexes
me by the obscurity of style which I find in
almost all our younger philosophers. He asks
me, however, two direct questions which I
understand, so I take the liberty of answering.

First he asks: Do not experience and science
show 'that countless things are 2 experienced
as that which they are not or are only par
tially?' I reply : Yes, assuredly, as, for example,

'things' distorted by refractive media, 'mole
cules,' or whatever else is taken to be more

1 [" In Reply to Professor James," Journal of Philosophy, Psycho
logy and Scientific Methods, vol. rv, No. 2, January 17, 1907. ED.]

8 Mr. Pitkin inserts the clause: 'by reason of the very nature of
experience itself.' Not understanding just what reason is meant, I do
apt include this clause in my answer.

242

PITKIN ON 'RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ultimately real than the immediate content of
the perceptive moment.

Secondly: "If experience is self-supporting 1
(in any intelligible sense) does this fact pre
clude the possibility of (a) something not
experienced and (b) action of experience upon
a noumenon ?"

My reply is: Assuredly not the possibility
of either — how could it? Yet in my opinion
we should be wise not to consider any thing
or action of that nature, and to restrict our
universe of philosophic discourse to what is
experienced or, at least, experienceable.2

1 [See above, p. 193. ED.]

2 [Elsewhere, in speaking of 'reality 'as "conceptual or perceptual
experiences," the author says: "This is meant merely to exclude real
ity of an 'unknowable* sort, of which no account in either perceptual
or conceptual terms can be given. It includes, of course, any amount
of empirical reality independent of the knower." Meaning of Truth,
p. 100, note. ED.]

HUMANISM AND TRUTH ONCE
MORE.1

MR. JOSEPH'S criticism of my article 'Hu
manism and Truth ' 2 is a useful contribution to
the general clearing up. He has seriously tried
to comprehend what the pragmatic movement
may intelligibly mean; and if he has failed, it
is the fault neither of his patience nor of his
sincerity, but rather of stubborn tricks of
thought which he could not easily get rid of.
Minute polemics, in which the parties try
to rebut every detail of each of the other's
charges, are a useful exercise only to the dis
putants. They can but breed confusion in a
reader. I will therefore ignore as much as
possible the text of both our articles (mine was
inadequate enough) and treat once more the
general objective situation.

1 [Reprinted without change from Mind, N. S., vol. xiv, No. 54,
April, 1905, pp. 190-198. Pages 245-247, and pp. 261-265, have also
been reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 54-57, and pp. 97-100.
The present essay is referred to above, p. 203. ED.]

2 ['Humanism and Truth 'first appeared in Mind, N. S., vol. xin,
No. 52, October, 1904. It is reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp.

244

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

As I apprehend the movement towards
humanism, it is based on no particular dis
covery or principle that can be driven into one
precise formula which thereupon can be im
paled upon a logical skewer. It is much more
like one of those secular changes that come
upon public opinion over-night, as it were,
borne upon tides 'too full for sound or foam/
that survive all the crudities and extrava
gances of their advocates, that you can pin to
no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill
by any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristo
cracy to democracy, from classic to romantic
taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from
static to evolutionary ways of understanding
life — changes of which we all have been
spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such
changes the method of confutation by single
decisive reasons, showing that the new view
involves self-contradiction, or traverses some
fundamental principle. This is like stopping

51-101. Cf. this article passim. Mr. H. W. B. Joseph's criticism,
entitled "Professor James on ' Humanism and Truth,' " appeared in
Mind, N. S., vol. xiv, No. 53, January, 1905. ED.]

245

, ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

a river by planting a stick in the middle of
its bed. Round your obstacle flows the water
and 'gets there all the same.' In reading Mr.
Joseph, I am not a little reminded of those
Catholic writers who refute Darwinism by
telling us that higher species can not come from
lower because minus nequit gignere plus, or
that the notion of transformation is absurd, for
it implies that species tend to their own de
struction, and that would violate the principle
that every reality tends to persevere in its own
shape. The point of view is too myopic, too
tight and close to take in the inductive argu
ment. You can not settle questions of fact by
formal logic. I feel as if Mr. Joseph almost
pounced on my words singly, without giving
the sentences time to get out of my mouth.

The one condition of understanding hu
manism is to become inductive-minded one
self, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow

V*
lines of least resistance 'on the wh^e.' "In

other words," Mr. Joseph may probably say,
"resolve your intellect into a kind of slush."
"Even so," I make reply, — "if you will con-

246

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

sent to use no politer word." For humanism,
conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satis
factory' (Dewey's term) has to renounce sin
cerely rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals
of rigor and finality. It is in just this tem
per of renunciation, so different from that
of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of
humanism essentially consists. Satisfactori-
ness has to be measured by a multitude of
"_ standards, of which some, for aught we know,
may fail in any given case; and what is 'more'
satisfactory than any alternative in sight, may
to the end be a sum of pluses and minuses,
concerning which we can only trust that by
ulterior corrections and improvements a maxi
mum of the one and a minimum of the other
may some day be approached. It means a real
change of heart, a break with absolutistic
hopes, when one takes up this view of the
conditions of belief.

That humanism's critics have never im
agined this attitude inwardly, is shown by
their invariable tactics. They do not get into
it far enough to see objectively and from with-

247

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

out what their own opposite notion of truth is.
Mr. Joseph is possessed by some such notion;
he thinks his readers to be full of it, he obeys
it, works from it, but never even essays to tell
us what it'is. The nearest he comes to doing
so is where l he says it is the way "we ought
to think," whether we be psychologically com
pelled to or not.

Of course humanism agrees to this: it is only
a manner of calling truth an ideal. But
humanism explicates the summarizing word
'ought ' into a mass of pragmatic motives from
the midst of which our critics think that truth
itself takes flight. Truth is a name of double
meaning. It stands now for an abstract some
thing defined only as that to which our thought
ought to conform; and again it stands for the
concrete propositions within which we believe
that conformity already reigns — they being
so many 'truths.' Humanism sees that the
only conformity we ever have to deal with
concretely is that between our subjects and
our predicates, using these words in a very

1 Op. cit., p. 37.
248

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

broad sense. It sees moreover that this con
formity is Validated' (to use Mr. Schiller's
term) by an indefinite number of pragmatic
tests that vary as the predicates and subjects
vary. If an S gets superseded by an SP that
gives our mind a completer sum of satisfac
tions, we always say, humanism points out,
that we have advanced to a better position in
regard to truth.

, Now many of our judgments thus attained
are retrospective. The S'es, so the judgment
runs, were SP's already ere the fact was hu
manly recorded. Common sense, struck by
this state of things, now rearranges the whole
field; and traditional philosophy follows her
example. The general requirement that predi
cates must conform to their subject, they
translate into an ontological theory. A most
previous Subject of all is substituted for the
lesser subjects and conceived of as an arche
typal Reality; and the conformity required of
predicates in detail is reinterpreted as a rela
tion which our whole mind, with all its sub
jects and predicates together, must get into

249

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

with respect to this Reality. It, meanwhile, is
conceived as eternal, static, and unaffected
by our thinking. Conformity to a non-human
Archetype like this is probably the notion of
truth which my opponent shares with common
sense and philosophic rationalism.

When now Humanism, fully admitting both
the naturalness and the grandeur of this hypo
thesis, nevertheless points to its sterility, and
declines to chime in with the substitution,
keeping to the concrete and still lodging truth
between the subjects and the predicates in
detail, it provokes the outcry which we hear
and which my critic echoes.

One of the commonest parts of the outcry is
that humanism is subjectivistic altogether —
it is supposed to labor under a necessity of
"denying trans-perceptual reality.' 1 It is not
hard to see how this misconception of human
ism may have arisen; and humanistic writers,
partly from not having sufficiently guarded
their expressions, and partly from not having
" got round" (in the poverty of their liter-

» [Cf. above, pp. 241-243.]
250

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

ature) to a full discussion of the subject, are
doubtless in some degree to blame. But I fail
to understand how any one with a working
grasp of their principles can charge them
wholesale . with subjectivism. [I myself have
never thought of humanism as being subject^
ivistic farther than to this extent, that, inas
much as it treats the thinker as being himself
one portion of reality, it must also allow that
some of the realities that he declares for true
are created by his being there. Such realities
of course are either acts of his, or relations
between other things and him, or relations
between things, which, but for him, would
never have been traced. Humanists are sub-
jectivistic, also in this, that, unlike rationalists
(who think they carry a warrant for the abso
lute truth of what they now believe in in their
present pocket), they hold all present beliefs
as subject to revision in the light of future
experience. The future experience, however,
may be of things outside the thinker; and that
this is so the humanist may believe as freely
as any other kind of empiricist philosopher.

251

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

The critics of humanism (though here I
follow them but darkly) appear to object to
any infusion whatever of subjectivism into
truth. All must be archetypal; every truth
must pre-exist to its perception. Humanism
sees that an enormous quantity of truth must
be written down as having pre-existed to its •»
perception by us humans. In countless in
stances we find it most satisfactory to believe
that, though we were always ignorant of the
fact, it always was a fact that S was SP. But
humanism separates this class of cases from
those in which it is more satisfactory to believe
the opposite, e.g., that S is ephemeral, or P a
passing event, or SP created by the perceiv
ing act. Our critics seem on the other hand,
to wish to universalize the retrospective type
of instance. Reality must pre-exist to every x
assertion for which truth is claimed. And, not
content with this overuse of one particular
type of judgment, our critics claim its mono
poly. They appear to wish to cut off Hu
manism from its rights to any retrospection

at all.

252

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

Humanism says that satisfactoriness is what
distinguishes the true from the false. But sat
isfactoriness is both a subjective quality, and
a present one. Ergo (the critics appear to
reason) an object, qua true, must always for
humanism be both present and subjective, and
a humanist's belief can never be in anything
that lives outside of the belief itself or ante
dates it. Why so preposterous a charge should
be so current, I find it hard to say. Nothing
is more obvious than the fact that both the
objective and the past existence of the object
may be the very things about it that most
seem satisfactory, and that most invite us to
believe them. The past tense can figure in the
humanist's world, as well of belief as of re
presentation, quite as harmoniously as in the
world of any one else.

Mr. Joseph gives a special turn to this
accusation. He charges me 1 with being self-
contradictory when I say that the main cate
gories of thought were evolved in the course of
experience itself. For I use these very cate-

^ 0p. ct/., p. 82.
253

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

gories to define the course of experience by.
Experience, as I talk about it, is a product of
their use; and yet I take it as true anteriorly
to them. This seems to Mr. Joseph to be an
absurdity. I hope it does not seem such to his
readers; for if experiences can suggest hypo
theses at all (and they notoriously do so) I can
see no absurdity whatever in the notion of a
retrospective hypothesis having for its object
the very train of experiences by which its own
being, along with that of other things, has
been brought about. If the hypothesis is
'satisfactory' we must, of course, believe it
to have been true anteriorly to its formula
tion by ourselves. Every explanation of
a present by a past seems to involve this
kind of circle, which is not a vicious circle.
The past is causa existendi of the present,
which in turn is causa cognoscendi of the
past. If the present were treated as causa ex
istendi of the past, the circle might indeed be
vicious.

Closely connected with this pseudo-diffi
culty is another one of wider scope and greater

254

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

complication — more excusable therefore.1
Humanism, namely, asking how truth in point
of fact is reached, and seeing that it is by ever
substituting more satisfactory for less satis
factory opinions, is thereby led into a vague
historic sketch of truth's development. The
earliest 'opinions,' it thinks, must have been
dim, unconnected 'feelings,' and only little by
little did more and more orderly views of
things replace them. Our own retrospective
view of this whole evolution is now, let us say,
the latest candidate for 'truth' as yet reached
in the process. To be a satisfactory candidate,
it must give some definite sort of a picture of
what forces keep the process going. On the
subjective side we have a fairly definite picture
— sensation, association, interest, hypothesis,
these account in a general way for the growth
into a cosmos of the relative chaos with which
the mind began.

But on the side of the object, so to call it
roughly, our view is much less satisfactory.

1 [This] Mr. Joseph deals with (though in much too pettifogging
and logic-chopping a way) on pp. 33-34 of his article.

255

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Of which of our many objects are we to believe
that it truly was there and at work before
the human mind began? Time, space, kind,
number, serial order, cause, consciousness,
are hard things not to objectify — even tran
scendental idealism leaves them standing as
'empirically real.' Substance, matter, force,
fall down more easily before criticism, and
secondary qualities make almost no resistance
at all. Nevertheless, when we survey the field
of speculation, from Scholasticism through
Kantism to Spencerism, we find an ever-recur
ring tendency to convert the pre-human into a
merely logical object, an unknowable ding-an-
sich, that but starts the process, or a vague
materia prima that but receives our forms.1

The reasons for this are not so much logical
as they are material. We can postulate an
extra-mental that freely enough (though some
idealists have denied us the privilege), but
when we have done so, the what of it is hard

1 Compare some elaborate articles by M. Le Roy and M. Wilbois
in the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vols. vm, ix, and x, [1900,
1901, and 1902.1

256

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

to determine satisfactorily, because of the op
positions and entanglements of the variously •
proposed whats with one another and with the
history of the human mind. The literature of
speculative cosmology bears witness to this
difficulty. Humanism suffers from it no more
than any other philosophy suffers, but it
makes all our cosmogonic theories so unsatis
factory that some thinkers seek relief in the
denial of any primal dualism. Absolute
Thought or 'pure experience' is postulated,
and endowed with attributes calculated to
justify the belief that it may 'run itself.' Both
these truth-claiming hypotheses are non-
dualistic in the old mind-and-matter sense;
but the one is monistic and the other pluralistic
as to the world process itself. Some humanists
are non-dualists of this sort — I myself am
one und zwar of the pluralistic brand. But
doubtless dualistic humanists also exist, as
well as non-dualistic ones of the monistic wing.
Mr. Joseph pins these general philosophic
difficulties on humanism alone, or possibly on
me alone. My article spoke vaguely of a

257

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

'most chaotic pure experience' coming first,
and building up the mind.1 But how can two
structureless things interact so as to produce
a structure? my critic triumphantly asks. Of
course they can't, as purely so-named entities.
We must make additional hypotheses. We
must beg a minimum of structure for them.
The kind of minimum that might have tended
to increase towards what we now find actually
developed is the philosophical desideratum
here. The question is that of the most ma
terially satisfactory hypothesis. Mr. Joseph
handles it by formal logic purely, as if he had
no acquaintance with the logic of hypothesis
at all.

Mr. Joseph again is much bewildered as to
what a humanist can mean when he uses the
word knowledge. He tries to convict me 2 of
vaguely identifying it with any kind of good.
Knowledge is a difficult thing to define briefly,
and Mr. Joseph shows his own constructive
hand here even less than in the rest of his

1 [Cf. The Meaning of Truth, p. 64.] ,

2 [Joseph: op. cil., p. 36.]

258

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

article. I have myself put forth on several
occasions a radically pragmatist account of
knowledge,1 the existence of which account my
critic probably does not know of — so perhaps
I had better not say anything about knowledge
until he reads and attacks that. I will say,
however, that whatever the relation called
knowing may itself prove to consist in, I can
think of no conceivable kind of object which
may not become an object of knowledge on
humanistic principles as well as on the prin
ciples of any other philosophy.2

I confess that I am pretty steadily hampered
by the habit, on the part of humanism's crit
ics, of assuming that they have truer ideas
than mine of truth and knowledge, the nature
of which I must know^of and can not need to
have re-defined. I have consequently to recon
struct these ideas in order to carry on the dis
cussion (I have e.g. had to do so in some parts

1 Most recently in two articles, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"
and " A World of Pure Experience." [See above, pp. 1-91.]

2 For a recent attempt, effective on the whole, at squaring hu
manism with knowing, I may refer to Prof. Woodbridge's very able
address at the Saint Louis Congress, "The Field of Logic," printed
in Science, N. Y., November 4, 1904.

259

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

of this article) and I thereby expose myself
to charges of caricature. In one part of Mr.
Joseph's attack, however, I rejoice that we are
free from this embarrassment. It is an im
portant point and covers probably a genuine
difficulty, so I take it up last.

When, following Schiller and Dewey, I de
fine the true as that which gives the maximal
combination of satisfactions, and say that
satisfaction is a many-dimensional term that v
can be realized in various ways, Mr. Joseph
replies, rightly enough, that the chief satis
faction of a rational creature must always be

his thought that what he believes is true,
whether the truth brings him the satisfaction
of collateral profits or not. This would seem,
however, to make of truth the prior concept,
and to relegate satisfaction to a secondary
place.

Again, if to be satisfactory is what is meant

by being true, whose satisfactions, and which of
his satisfactions, are to count? Discrimina
tions notoriously have to be made; and the
upshot is that only rational candidates and

260

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

intellectual satisfactions stand the test. We
are then driven to a purely theoretic notion of
truth, and get out of the pragmatic atmos
phere altogether. And with this Mr. Joseph
leaves us — truth is truth, and there is an end
of the matter. But he makes a very pretty
show of convicting me of self-stultification in
according to our purely theoretic satisfactions
any place in the humanistic scheme. They
crowd the collateral satisfactions out of house
and home, he thinks, and pragmatism has to go
into bankruptcy if she recognizes them at all.

There is no room for disagreement about
the facts here; but the destructive force of the
reasoning disappears as soon as we talk con
cretely instead of abstractly, and ask, in our
quality of good pragmatists, just what the
famous theoretic needs are known as and in
what the intellectual satisfactions consist.
Mr. Joseph, faithful to the habits of his party,
makes no attempt at characterizing them, but
assumes that their nature is self-evident to all.

Are they not all mere matters of consistency
— and emphatically not of consistency be-

261

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

tween an Absolute Reality and the mind's ,f
copies of it, but of actually felt consistency
among judgments, objects, and manners of
reacting, in the mind ? And are not both our
need of such consistency and our pleasure in it
conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact
that we are beings that develop mental habits \/

— habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in

an environment where the same objects, or the ~,
same kinds of objects, recur and follow 'law'?
If this were so, what would have come first
would have been the collateral profits of habit,
and the theoretic life would have grown up in *
aid of these. In point of fact this seems to
have been the probable case. At life's origin,
any present perception may have been 'true'

— if such a word could then be applicable.
Later, when reactions became organized, the
reactions became 'true' whenever expectation ,-
was fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were
'false' or 'mistaken' reactions. But the same
class of objects needs the same kind of reac
tion, so the impulse to react consistently must
gradually have been established, with a disap-

262

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

pointment felt whenever the results frustrated
expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ
for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if
an object claims from us a reaction of the kind
habitually accorded only to the opposite class
of objects, our mental machinery refuses to
run smoothly. The situation is intellectually
unsatisfactory. To gain relief we seek either
to preserve the reaction by re-interpreting the
object, or, leaving the object as it is, we react
in a way contrary to the way claimed of us.
Neither solution is easy. Such a situation
might be that of Mr. Joseph, with me claiming
assent to humanism from him. He can not
apperceive it so as to permit him to gratify my
claim; but there is enough appeal in the claim
to induce him to write a whole article in justi
fication of his refusal. If he should assent to
humanism, on the other hand, that would drag
after it an unwelcome, yea incredible, altera
tion of his previous mental beliefs. Whichever
alternative he might adopt, however, a new
equilibrium of intellectual consistency would
in the end be reached. He would feel, which-

263

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ever way he decided, that he was now thinking
truly. But if, with his old habits unaltered,
he should simply add to them the new one of
advocating humanism quietly or noisily, his
mind would be rent into two systems, each of
which would accuse the other of falsehood.
The resultant situation, being profoundly un
satisfactory, would also be instable.

Theoretic truth is thus no relation between
our mind and archetypal reality. It falls
within the mind, being the accord of some of
its processes and objects with other processes
and objects — 'accord' consisting here in
well-definable relations. So long as the satis
faction of feeling such an accord is denied us,
whatever collateral profits may seem to inure
from what we believe in are but as dust in the
balance — provided always that we are highly
organized intellectually, which the majority
of us are not. The amount of accord which
satisfies most men and women is merely the
absence of violent clash between their usual
thoughts and statements and the limited
sphere of sense-perceptions in which their lives

264

HUMANISM AND TRUTH

are cast. The theoretic truth that most of us
think we 'ought' to attain to is thus the pos
session of a set of predicates that do not con
tradict their subjects. We preserve it as often
as not by leaving other predicates and subjects
out.

In some men theory is a passion, just as
music is in others. The form of inner consist
ency is pursued far beyond the line at which
collateral profits stop. Such men systematize
and classify and schematize and make synopti
cal tables and invent ideal objects for the pure
love of unifying. Too often the results, glowing
with 'truth' for the inventors, seem patheti
cally personal and artificial to bystanders.
Which is as much as to say that the purely
theoretic criterion of truth can leave us in the
lurch as easily as any other criterion.

I think that if Mr. Joseph will but consider
all these things a little more concretely, he
may find that the humanistic scheme and the
notion of theoretic truth fall into line con
sistently enough to yield him also intellectual
satisfaction.

XII

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM1

JNo seeker of truth can fail to rejoice at the
terre-a-terre sort of discussion of the issues
between Empiricism and Transcendentalism
(or, as the champions of the latter would prob
ably prefer to say, between Irrationalism and
Rationalism) that seems to have begun in
Mind* It would seem as if, over concrete
examples like Mr. J. S. Haldane's, both parties
ought inevitably to come to a better under
standing. As a reader with a strong bias
towards Irrationalism, I have studied his
article 3 with the liveliest admiration of its
temper and its painstaking effort to be clear.
But the cases discussed failed to satisfy me,
and I was at first tempted to write a Note
animadverting upon them in detail. The
growth of the limb, the sea's contour, the
vicarious functioning of the nerve-centre, the
digitalis curing the heart, are unfortunately

1 [Reprinted from Mind, vol. EX. No. 34, April, 1884.]

2 [In 1884.1

3 ["Life and Mechanism," Mind, vol. EX, 1884.]

266

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

not cases where we can see any through-and-
through conditioning of the parts by the whole.
They are all cases of reciprocity where sub
jects, supposed independently to exist, acquire
certain attributes through their relations to
other subjects. That they also exist through
similar relations is only an ideal supposition,
not verified to our understanding in these or
any other concrete cases whatsoever.

If, however, one were to urge this solemnly,
Mr. Haldane's friends could easily reply that
he only gave us such examples on account of
the hardness of our hearts. He knew full well
their imperfection, but he hoped that to those
who would not spontaneously ascend to the
Notion of the Totality, these cases might
prove a spur and suggest and symbolize some
thing better than themselves. No particu
lar case that can be brought forward is a
real concrete. They are all abstractions from
the Whole, and of course the "through-and-
through" character can not be found in them.
Each of them still contains among its elements
what we call things, grammatical subjects,

267

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

forming a sort of residual caput mortuum of
Existence after all the relations that figure in
the examples have been told off. On this
"existence," thinks popular philosophy, things
may live on, like the winter bears on their own
fat, never entering relations at all, or, if enter
ing them, entering an entirely different set
of them from those treated of in Mr. Hal-
dane's examples. Thus if the digitalis were to
weaken instead of strengthening the heart, and
to produce death (as sometimes happens), it
would determine itself, through determining
the organism, to the function of "kill" instead
of that of "cure." The function and relation
seem adventitious, depending on what kind of
a heart the digitalis gets hold of, the digitalis
and the heart being facts external and, so to
speak, accidental to each other. But this popu
lar view, Mr. Haldane's friends will continue,
is an illusion. What seems to us the "exist
ence" of digitalis and heart outside of the rela
tions of killing or curing, is but a function in a
wider system of relations, of which, pro hac
vice, we take no account. The larger system

268

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

determines the existence just as absolutely as
the system "kill," or the system "cure," de
termined the function of the digitalis. As
cend to the absolute system, instead of biding
with these relative and partial ones, and you
shall see that the law of through-and-through-
ness must and does obtain.

Of course, this argument is entirely reason
able, and debars us completely from chopping
logic about the concrete examples Mr. Hal-
dane has chosen. It is not his fault if his cate
gories are so fine an instrument that nothing
but the sum total of things can be taken to
show us the manner of their use. It is simply
our misfortune that he has not the sum total of
things to show it by. Let us fall back from all
concrete attempts and see what we can do with
his notion of through-and-throughness, avow
edly taken in abstracto. In abstract systems
the "through-and-through" Ideal is realized
on every hand. In any system, as such, the
members are only members in the system.
Abolish the system and you abolish its mem
bers, for you have conceived them through no

269

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

other property than the abstract one of mem
bership. Neither Tightness nor leftness, except
through bi-laterality. Neither mortgager nor
mortgagee, except through mortgage. The
logic of these cases is this: — // A, then B; but
if B, then A: wherefore if either, Both; and if
not Both, Nothing.

It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to
admit that the absolute totality of things may
be organized exactly after the pattern of one
of these "through-and-through" abstractions.
In fact, it is the pleasantest and freest of men
tal movements. Husband makes, and is made
by, wife, through marriage; one makes other,
by being itself other; everything self -created
through its opposite — you go round like a
squirrel in a cage. But if you stop and reflect
upon what you are about, you lay bare the
exact point at issue between common sense
and the "through-and-through" school.

What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract
systems? It is, as we said above : If any Mem
ber, then the Whole System; if not the Whole
System, then Nothing. But how can Logic

270

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

possibly do anything more with these two
hypotheses than combine them into the single
disjunctive proposition — "Either this Whole
System, just as it stands, or Nothing at all."
Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of
Logic in the matter, and can any disjunction,
as such, resolve itself? It may be that Mr.
Haldane sees how one horn, the concept of the
Whole System, carries real existence with it.
But if he has been as unsuccessful as I in assim
ilating the Hegelian re-editings of the Anselm-
ian proof,1 he will have to say that though
Logic may determine what the system must
be, if it is, something else than Logic must tell
us that it is. Mr. Haldane in this case would
probably consciously, or unconsciously, make
an appeal to Fact: the disjunction is decided,
since nobody can dispute that now, as a mat
ter of fact, something, and not nothing, is. We
must therefore, he would probably say, go on
to admit the Whole System in the desiderated
sense. Is not then the validity of the Anselm-

» [C/. P. Janet and G.S&illes: History of the Problems of Philosophy,
trans, by Monahan, vol. 11, pp. 275-278; 305-307. ED.!

271

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

ian proof the nucleus of the whole question be
tween Logic and Fact? Ought not the efforts
of Mr. Haldane and his friends to be princi
pally devoted to its elucidation? Is it not the
real door of separation between Empiricism
and Rationalism ? And if the Rationalists
leave that door for a moment off its hinges, can
any power keep that abstract, opaque, unme-
diated, external, irrational, and irresponsible
monster, known to the vulgar as bare Fact,
from getting in and contaminating the whole
sanctuary with his presence? Can anything
prevent Faust from changing "Am Anfang
war das Wort" into "Am Anfang war die
That?"

Nothing in earth or heaven. Only the An-
selmian proof can keep Fact out of philo
sophy. The question, "Shall Fact be recog
nized as an ultimate principle?" is the whole
issue between the Rationalists and the Empiri-
cism of vulgar thought.

Of course, if so recognized, Fact sets a limit
to the " through-and-through " character of
the world's rationality. That rationality might

272

'ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

then mediate between all the members of our
conception of the world, but not between the
conception itself and reality. Reality would
have to be given, not by Reason, but by Pact.
Fact holds out blankly, brutally and blindly,
against that universal deliquescence of every
thing into logical relations which the Absolut
ist Logic demands, and it is the only thing
that does hold out. Hence the ire of the Ab
solutist Logic — hence its non-recognition, its
'cutting' of Fact.

The reasons it gives for the * cutting' are
that Fact is speechless, a mere word for the
negation of thought, a vacuous unknowability,
a dog-in-the-manger, in truth, which having no
rights of its own, can find nothing else to do
than to keep its betters out of theirs.

There are two points involved here: first the
claim that certain things have rights that are
absolute, ubiquitous and all pervasive, and in
regard to which nothing else can possibly exist
in its own right; and second that anything that
denies this assertion is pure negativity with no
positive context whatsoever.

273

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Take the latter point first. Is it true that
what is negative in one way is thereby con
victed of incapacity to be positive in any other
way? The word " Fact " is like the word "Acci
dent," like the word "Absolute" itself. They
all have their negative connotation. In truth,
their whole connotation is negative and rela
tive. All it says is that, whatever the thing
may be that is denoted by the words, other
things do not control it. Where fact, where
accident is, they must be silent, it alone can
speak. But that does not prevent its speaking
as loudly as you please, in its own tongue. It
may have an inward life, self -transparent and
active in the maximum degree. An indeter
minate future volition on my part, for example,
would be a strict accident as far as my present
self is concerned. But that could not prevent
it, in the moment in which it occurred, from being
possibly the most intensely living and lumin
ous experience I ever had. Its quality of being
a brute fact ab extra says nothing whatever as
to its inwardness. It simply says to outsiders:

'Bands off!'*

274

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

And this brings us back to the first point of
the Absolutist indictment of Fact. Is that
point really anything more than a fantastic
dislike to letting anything say 'Hands off'?
What else explains the contempt the Abso
lutist authors exhibit for a freedom defined
simply on its "negative" side, as freedom
"from," etc.? What else prompts them to
deride such freedom? But, dislike for dislike,
who shall decide? Why is not their dislike at
having me "from" them, entirely on a par
with mine at having them "through" me?

I know very well that in talking of dislikes
to those who never mention them, I am doing
a very coarse thing, and making a sort of intel
lectual Orson of myself. But, for the life of
me, I can not help it, because I feel sure that
likes and dislikes must be among the ultimate
factors of their philosophy as well as of mine.
Would they but admit it! How sweetly we
then could hold converse together! There is
something finite about us both, as we now
stand. We do not know the Absolute Whole
yet. Part of it is still negative to us. Among

275

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

the whats of it still stalks a mob of opaque
thats, without which we cannot think. But
just as I admit that this is all possibly pro
visional, that even the Anselmian proof may
come out all right, and creation may be a
rational system through-and-through, why
might they not also admit that it may all be
otherwise, and that the shadow, the opacity,
the negativity, the "from "-ness, the plurality
that is ultimate, may never be wholly driven
from the scene. We should both then be avow
edly making hypotheses, playing with Ideals.
Ah ! Why is the notion of hypothesis so abhor
rent to the Hegelian mind ?

And once down on our common level of
hypothesis, we might then admit scepticism,
since the Whole is not yet revealed, to be the
soundest logical position. But since we are in
the main not sceptics, we might go on and
frankly confess to each other the motives for
our several faiths. I frankly confess mine — I
can' not but think that at bottom they are of
an aesthetic and not of a logical sort. The
"through-and-through" universe seems to

276

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-
pervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibili
ties; its relations, with no subjects, make me
feel as if I had entered into a contract with
no reserved rights, or rather as if I had to live
in a large seaside boarding-house with no pri
vate bed-room in which I might take refuge
from the society of the place. I am distinctly
aware, moreover, that the old quarrel of sinner
and pharisee has something to do with the
matter. Certainly, to my personal knowledge,
all Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel
as if all prigs ought to end, if developed, by
becoming Hegelians. There is a story of two
clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the
same funeral. One came first and had got no
farther than "I am the Resurrection and the
Life," when the other entered. "7 am the
Resurrection and the Life," cried the latter.
The "through-and-through" philosophy, as it
actually exists, reminds many of us of that
clergyman. It seems too buttoned-up and
white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to
speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious

277

ESSAYS IN RADICAL EMPIRICISM

Kosmos with its dread abysses and its un
known tides. The "freedom" we want to see
there is not the freedom, with a string tied to
its leg and warranted not to fly away, of that
philosophy. "Let it fly away," we say, "from
us! What then?"

Again, I know I am exhibiting my mental
grossness. But again, Ich Jcann nicht anders. I
show my feelings; why will they not show
theirs? I know they have a personal feeling
about the through-and-through universe,
which is entirely different from mine, and
which I should very likely be much the better
for gaining if they would only show me how.
Their persistence in telling me that feeling has
nothing to do with the question, that it is a
pure matter of absolute reason, keeps me for
ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that in
things which Logic does not expel, the most I V
can do is to aspire to the expulsion. At present
I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a feeling.
What can kindle feeling but the example of
feeling? And if the Hegelians mil refuse to set

an example, what can they expect the rest of

278

ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM

us to do? To speak more seriously, the one
fundamental quarrel Empiricism has with Ab
solutism is over this repudiation by Abso
lutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in
the construction of philosophy. That we all of
us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure.
That they may be as prophetic and anticipa
tory of truth as anything else we have, and
some of them more so than others, can not
possibly be denied. But what hope is there of
squaring and settling opinions unless Absolut
ism will hold parley on this common ground;
and will admit that all philosophies are hypo
theses, to which all our faculties, emotional
as well as logical, help us, and the truest of
which will at the final integration of things be
found in possession of the men whose faculties
on the whole had the best divining power?

INDEX

ABSOLUTE IDEALISM: 46, 60, 99, EMPIRICISM: iv-v, vii-xiii, 41, 46-

102, 134, 195, 256 ff., Essay XII.
ACTIVITY: x, Essay VI.
AFFECTIONAL FACTS: 34 ff., Essay

V, 217 ff.

AGNOSTICISM: 195.
APPRECIATIONS. See APFECTIONAL

FACTS.

BERGSON, H.: 156, 188.
BERKELEY: 10-11, 43, 76, 77, 212,

232.

BODE, B. H.: 234 ff.
BODY: 78, 84 ff., 153, 221.
BRADLEY, F. H.: 60. 98. 99. 100,

107 ff., 157, 162.

CAUSE: 163, 174, 181 ff.

CHANGE: 161.

COGNITIVE RELATION: 52 ff. See
also under KNOWLEDGE.

CONCEPTS: 15 ff.,. 22, 33, 54 ff.,
65 ff.

CONJUNCTIVE RELATIONS : x, 44 ff .,
59, 70, 94, 104, 107 ff., 117 ff.,
163, 240.

CONSCIOUSNESS: xi, Essay I, 75,
80, 127 ff., 139 ff., 154, 184, Es
say VIII.

CONTINUITY: 48 ff., 59, 70, 94.

DEMOCRITUS: 11.

DESCARTES: 30.

DEWEY, J.: 53, 156, 191, 204,247,

260.
DISJUNCTIVE RELATIONS: x, 42 ff.,

105, 107 ff.
DUALISM: 10, 207 ff.. 223, 257.

47, Essay XII. See also under
RADICAL EMPIRICISM.

EPISTEMOLOGY: 239. See also un
der KNOWLEDGE. ,

ETHICS: 194.

EXPERIENCE: vii, xii, 8 ff., 53, 62,
ff., 71, 80, 87, 92, 216, 224, 233,
242, 243. See also under PURE
EXPERIENCE.

EXTERNAL RELATIONS : 1 1 0 ff . See

also under RELATIONS,
DISJUNCTIVE.

and

FEELING. See under AFTECTIONAL

FACTS.
FREE WILL: 185.

HALDANE, J. S.: 266 ff.
HEGEL: 106, 276, 277.
HERBART: 106.
HOBHOUSE, L. T.: 109.
HODDER, A. L.: 22, 109.
HODGSON, S.: ix, 48.
HOFFDING, H.: 238.
HUMANISM; 90, 156, Essay VII.

Essay XI.
HUME: x. 42, 43, 103, 174.

IDEALISM: 39, 40, 134, 219, 241.

256.

IDEAS: 55 ff., 73, 177, 209.
IDENTITY, Philosophy of: 134,

197, 202.

INDETERMINISM: 90, 274.
INTELLECT: 97 ff.

JOSEPH. H. W. B.: 203, 244 ff.
281

INDEX

KANT: 1, 37, 162, 206.

KIERKEGAARD: 238.

KNOWLEDGE: 4, 25, 56 ff., 68 ff.,
87-88, 196 ff., 231. See also un
der COGNITIVE RELATION, OB
JECTIVE REFERENCE.

LIFE: 87, 161.
LOCKE: 10.
LOGIC: 269 ff.
LOTZE: 59, 75, 167.

MATERIALISM: 179, 232.

MILL, J. S.:x, 43, 76.

MILL, JAMES: 43.

MILLER, D.: 54.

MINDS, their Conterminousness:

76 ff., Essay IV.
MONISM: vii, 208, 267 ff.
MOORE, G. E.: 6-7.
MUNSTERBERG, H.: 1. 18-20, 158.

NATORP, P.: 1, 7-8.
NATURALISM: 96.
NEO-KANTISM: 5-6.

OBJECTIVE REFERENCE: 67 ff.
OBJECTIVITY: 23 ff., 79.

PANPSYCHISM: 89, 188.
PARALLELISM: 210.
PERCEPTION: 11 ff., 17, 33, 65, 78,

82 ff., 197, 200, 211 ff.
PERRY, R. B.: 24.
PHYSICAL REALITY: 14, 22, 32, 124

ff., 139 ff., 149 ff., 154, 211 ff.,

229, 235.

PITKIN, W. B.:241ff.
PLURALISM: 89, 90, 110.
PRAGMATISM: iv, x, xi-xii, 11, 72,

97 ff., 156, 159, 176, 242, 261.
PRIMARY QUALITIES: 147.

PRINCE, M.:88.

PRINGLE-PATTISON, A. S. : 109.

PSYCHOLOGY: 206, 209 ff.

PURE EXPERIENCE: 4, 23, 26-27,
35, Essay II, 74, 90, 93 ff., 96,
121, 123, 134, 135, 138, 139, 160,
193, 200, 226 ff., 257.

RADICAL EMPIRICISM: iv-v, vii,
ix-xiii, 41 ff., 47, 48, 69, 76, 89,
91, 107, 109, 121, 148, 156, 159.
182, 235, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242.

RATIONALISM: 41, 96 ff., 237, 266.

REALISM: 16, 40, 76, 82 ff.

REHMKE, J.: 1.

RELATIONS: x, 16, 25, 42 ff., 71, 81,
Essay III, 148, 268. See also un
der CONJUNCTIVE and DISJUNC
TIVE.

RELIGION: xiii, 194.

RENOUVIER: 184-185.

REPRESENTATION: 61, 196 ff., 212
ff. See also under SUBSTITU
TION.

ROYCE, J.: 21, 158, 186-187, 195.

SANTAYANA, G.: 143, 218.
SCHILLER, F. C. S.: 109, 191, 204,
249, 260.

SCHUBERT-SOLDERN, R. V. : 2.

SCHUPPE, W.:l.

SECONDARY QUALITIES: 146, 219.

SELF: 45, 46, 94, 128 ff.

SENSATION: 30, 201.

SIDIS, B.: 144.

SOLIPSISM: Essay IX.

SPACE: 30-31, 84, 94, 110, 114.

SPENCER, H.: 144.

SPINOZA: 208.

SPIR, A.: 106.

STOUT, G. F.: 109, 158. I * 1 ,' l

STRONG, C. A.: 54, 88, 89, 188.

282

INDEX

SUBJECTIVITY: 23 ff., 234ff., 251ff.
SUBSTITUTION: 62 ff., 104, 201.

TAINE: 20, 62.

TAYLOR, A. E.: 111.

TELEOLOGY: 179.

THINGS: 1, 9 ff., 28 ff., 37, Essay

III, 209.
THOUGHT: 1, 22, 28 ff., 37, 213.

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